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FINITE

INFINITE

GAMES

AVision of Life as Play and Possibility

JAMES P. C A R S E

Finite and
Infinite
Games

JAMESPCARSE

THE FREE PRESS
A Division of Macmillan, Inc.
New York

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

The Free Press

A Division of Macmillan, Inc.

866 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022

Collier Macmillan Canada, Inc.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 86-14304

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-Ln-Publicatlon Data

Carse, James P.

Finite and infinite games.

Includes index.

1. Life. 2. Games-Symbolic aspects. 3. Religion.
4. Philosophy. I. Title.

BD431.C297 1986 110 86-14304

ISBN 0-02-905980-1

This book is dedicated to
Alisa , Keene, and Jamie , of course.

Contents

one:

There Are at Least Two Kinds of Games

two:

No One Can Play a Game Alone

three:

I Am the Genius of Myself

four:

A Finite Game Occurs Within a World

five:

Nature Is the Realm of the Unspeakable

Six:

We Control Nature for Societal Reasons

115

seven:

Myth Provokes Explanation
but Accepts None of It

137

Index

151

ONE

There Are at
LeastTwo
Kinds of
Games

There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called
finite, the other infinite.

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an
infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

If a finite game is to be won by someone it must come
to a definitive end. It will come to an end when someone
has won.

We know that someone has won the game when all the
players have agreed who among them is the winner. No other
condition than the agreement of the players is absolutely re¬
quired in determining who has won the game.

It may appear that the approval of the spectators, or the
referees, is also required in the determination of the winner.
However, it is simply the case that if the players do not agree
on a winner, the game has not come to a decisive conclusion—
and the players have not satisfied the original purpose of play¬
ing. Even if they are carried from the field and forcibly blocked
from further play, they will not consider the game ended.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 3

Suppose the players all agree, but the spectators and the
referees do not. Unless the players can be persuaded that
their agreement was mistaken, they will not resume the play—
indeed, they cannot resume the play. We cannot imagine
players returning to the field and truly playing if they are
convinced the game is over.

There is no finite game unless the players freely choose
to play it. No one can play who is forced to play.

It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite,
that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot
play.

Just as it is essential for a finite game to have a definitive
ending, it must also have a precise beginning. Therefore, we
can speak of finite games as having temporal boundaries—
to which, of course, all players must agree. But players must
agree to the establishment of spatial and numerical boundaries
as well. That is, the game must be played within a marked
area, and with specified players.

Spatial boundaries are evident in every finite conflict, from
the simplest board and court games to world wars. The oppo¬
nents in World War II agreed not to bomb Heidelberg and
Paris and declared Switzerland outside the boundaries of con¬
flict. When unnecessary and excessive damage is inflicted by
one of the sides in warfare, a question arises as to the legitimacy
of the victory that side may claim, even whether it has been
a war at all and not simply gratuitous unwarranted violence.
When Sherman burned his way from Atlanta to the sea, he
so ignored the sense of spatial limitation that for many persons

the war was not legitimately won by the Union Army, and
has in fact never been concluded.

Numerical boundaries take many forms but are always ap¬
plied in finite games. Persons are selected for finite play. It
is the case that we cannot play if we must play, but it is
also the case that we cannot play alone. Thus, in every case,
we must find an opponent, and in most cases teammates,
who are willing to join in play with us. Not everyone who
wishes to do so may play for, or against, the New York Yankees.
Neither may they be electricians or agronomists by individual
choice, without the approval of their potential colleagues and
competitors.

Because finite players cannot select themselves for play,
there is never a time when they cannot be removed from
the game, or when the other contestants cannot refuse to
play with them. The license never belongs to the licensed,
nor the commission to the officer.

What is preserved by the constancy of numerical bound¬
aries, of course, is the possibility that all contestants can agree
on an eventual winner. Whenever persons may walk on or
off the field of play as they wish, there is such a confusion
of participants that none can emerge as a clear victor. Who,
for example, won the French Revolution?

To have such boundaries means that the date, place, and
membership of each finite game are externally defined. When
we say of a particular contest that it began on September 1,
1939, we are speaking from the perspective of world time;
that is, from the perspective of what happened before the

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 5

beginning of the conflict and what would happen after its
conclusion. So also with place and membership. A game is
played in that place, with those persons.

The world is elaborately marked by boundaries of contest,
its people finely classified as to their eligibilities.

Only one person or team can win a finite game, but the
other contestants may well be ranked at the conclusion of
play.

Not everyone can be a corporation president, although some
who have competed for that prize may be vice presidents or
district managers.

There are many games we enter not expecting to win, but
in which we nonetheless compete for the highest possible
ranking.

In one respect, but only one, an infinite game is identical
to a finite game: Of infinite players we can also say that if
they play they play freely; if they must play, they cannot
play.

Otherwise, infinite and finite play stand in the sharpest
possible contrast.

Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor
do they care. They do not care for the reason that their game
is not bounded by time. Indeed, the only purpose of the game

is to prevent it from coming to an end, to keep everyone in
play.

There are no spatial or numerical boundaries to an infinite
game. No world is marked with the barriers of infinite play,
and there is no question of eligibility since anyone who wishes
may play an infinite game.

While finite games are externally defined, infinite games
are internally defined. The time of an infinite game is not
world time, but time created within the play itself. Since
each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens
to players a new horizon of time.

For this reason it is impossible to say how long an infinite
game has been played, or even can be played, since duration
can be measured only externally to that which endures. It is
also impossible to say in which world an infinite game is played,
though there can be any number of worlds within an infinite
game.

Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but
an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game.

Infinite players regard their wins and losses in whatever
finite games they play as but moments in continuing play.

If finite games must be externally bounded by time, space,
and number, they must also have internal limitations on what

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 7

the players can do to and with each other. To agree on internal
limitations is to establish rules of play .

The rules will be different for each finite game. It is, in
fact, by knowing what the rules are that we know what the
game is.

What the rules establish is a range of limitations on the
players: each player must, for example, start behind the white
line, or have all debts paid by the end of the month, charge
patients no more than they can reasonably afford, or drive
in the right lane.

In the narrowest sense rules are not laws; they do not man¬
date specific behavior, but only restrain the freedom of the
players, allowing considerable room for choice within those
restraints.

If these restraints are not observed, the outcome of the
game is directly threatened. The rules of a finite game are
the contractual terms by which the players can agree who
has won.

The rules must be published prior to play, and the players
must agree to them before play begins.

A point of great consequence to all finite play follows from
this: The agreement of the players to the applicable rules consti¬
tutes the ultimate validation of those rules.

Rules are not valid because the Senate passed them, or
because heroes once played by them, or because God pro¬
nounced them through Moses or Muhammad. They are valid
only if and when players freely play by them.

There are no rules that require us to obey rules. If there
were, there would have to be a rule for those rules, and so
on.

If the rules of a finite game are unique to that game it is
evident that the rules may not change in the course of play —
else a different game is being played.

It is on this point that we find the most critical distinction
between finite and infinite play: The rules of an infinite game
must change in the course of play . The rules are changed
when the players of an infinite game agree that the play is
imperiled by a finite outcome—that is, by the victory of some
players and the defeat of others.

The rules of an infinite game are changed to prevent anyone
from winning the game and to bring as many persons as possi¬
ble into the play.

If the rules of a finite game are the contractual terms by
which the players can agree who has won, the rules of an
infinite game are the contractual terms by which the players
agree to continue playing.

For this reason the rules of an infinite game have a different
status from those of a finite game. They are like the grammar
of a living language, where those of a finite game are like
the rules of debate. In the former case we observe rules as
a way of continuing discourse with each other; in the latter
we observe rules as a way of bringing the speech of another
person to an end.

The rules, or grammar, of a living language are always evolv-

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 9

ing to guarantee the meaningfulness of discourse, while the
rules of debate must remain constant.

Although the rules of an infinite game may change by agree¬
ment at any point in the course of play, it does not follow
that any rule will do. It is not in this sense that the game
is infinite.

The rules are always designed to deal with specific threats
to the continuation of play. Infinite players use the rules to
regulate the way they will take the boundaries or limits being
forced against their play into the game itself.

The rule-making capacity of infinite players is often chal¬
lenged by the impingement of powerful boundaries against
their play—such as physical exhaustion, or the loss of material
resources, or the hostility of nonplayers, or death.

The task is to design rules that will allow the players to
continue the game by taking these limits into play—even
when death is one of the limits. It is in this sense that the
game is infinite.

This is equivalent to saying that no limitation may be im¬
posed against infinite play. Since limits are taken into play,
the play itself cannot be limited.

Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play
with boundaries.

Although it may be evident enough in theory that whoever
plays a finite game plays freely, it is often the case that finite

players will be unaware of this absolute freedom and will come
to think that whatever they do they must do. There are several
possible reasons for this:

—We saw that finite players must be selected. While
no one is forced to remain a lawyer or a rodeo performer or
a kundalini yogi after being selected for these roles, each role
is nonetheless surrounded both by ruled restraints and expecta¬
tions on the part of others. One senses a compulsion to main¬
tain a certain level of performance, because permission to
play in these games can be canceled. We cannot do whatever
we please and remain lawyers or yogis—and yet we could
not be either unless we pleased.

—Since finite games are played to be won , players make
every move in a game in order to win it. Whatever is not
done in the interest of winning is not part of the game. The
constant attentiveness of finite players to the progress of the
competition can lead them to believe that every move they
make they must make.

—It may appear that the prizes for winning are indispensa¬
ble, that without them life is meaningless, perhaps even impos¬
sible. There are, to be sure, games in which the stakes seem
to be life and death. In slavery, for example, or severe political
oppression, the refusal to play the demanded role may be
paid for with terrible suffering or death.

Even in this last, extreme case we must still concede that
whoever takes up the commanded role does so by choice.
Certainly the price for refusing it is high, but that there is
a price at all points to the fact that oppressors themselves
acknowledge that even the weakest of their subjects must
agree to be oppressed. If the subjects were unresisting puppets
or automatons, no threat would be necessary, and no price
would be paid—thus the satire of the putative ideal of oppres-

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 11

sors in Huxley's Gammas, Orwell's Proles, and Rossum's Uni¬
versal Robots (Capek).

Unlike infinite play, finite play is limited from without;
like infinite play, those limitations must be chosen by the
player since no one is under any necessity to play a finite
game. Fields of play simply do not impose themselves on
us. Therefore, all the limitations of finite play are self-limita¬
tions.

To account for the large gap between the actual freedom
of finite players to step off the field of play at any time and
the experienced necessity to stay at the struggle, we can say
that as finite players we somehow veil this freedom from our¬
selves.

Some self-veiling is present in all finite games. Players must
intentionally forget the inherently voluntary nature of their
play, else all competitive effort will desert them.

From the outset of finite play each part or position must
be taken up with a certain seriousness; players must see them¬
selves as teacher, as light-heavyweight, as mother. In the
proper exercise of such roles we positively believe we are the
persons those roles portray. Even more: we make those roles
believable to others. It is in the nature of acting, Shaw said,
that we are not to see this woman as Ophelia, but Ophelia
as this woman.

If the actress is so skillful that we do see Ophelia as this
woman, it follows that we do not see performed emotions
and hear recited words, but a person's true feelings and speech.
To some extent the actress does not see herself performing
but feels her performed emotion and actually says her memo-

rized lines—and yet the very fact that they are performed
means that the words and feelings belong to the role and
not to the actress. In fact, it is one of the requirements of
her craft that she keep her own person distinct from the
role. What she feels as the person she is has nothing to do
with Ophelia and must not enter into her playing of the
part.

Of course, not for a second will this woman in her acting
be unaware that she is acting. She never forgets that she
has veiled herself sufficiently to play this role, that she has
chosen to forget for the moment that she is this woman and
not Ophelia. But then, neither do we as audience forget we
are audience. Even though we see this woman as Ophelia,
we are never in doubt that she is not. We are in complicity
with her veil. We allow her performed emotions to affect
us, perhaps powerfully. But we never forget that we allow
them to do so.

So it is with all roles. Only freely can one step into the
role of mother. Persons who assume this role, however, must
suspend their freedom with a proper seriousness in order to
act as the role requires. A mother's words, actions, and feelings
belong to the role and not to the person—although some
persons may veil themselves so assiduously that they make
their performance believable even to themselves, overlooking
any distinction between a mother's feelings and their own.

The issue here is not whether self-veiling can be avoided,
or even should be avoided. Indeed, no finite play is possible
without it. The issue is whether we are ever willing to =drop
the veil and openly acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that
we have freely chosen to face the world through a mask.
Consider the actress whose skill at making Ophelia appear
as this woman demonstrates the clarity with which she can
distinguish the role from herself. Is it not possible that when

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES B

she leaves the stage she does not give up acting, but simply
leaves off one role for another, say the role of “actress,” an
abstracted personage whose public behavior is carefully
scripted and produced? At which point do we confront the
fact that we live one life and perform another, or others,
attempting to make our momentary forgetting true and lasting
forgetting?

What makes this an issue is not the morality of masking
ourselves. It is rather that self-veiling is a contradictory act—
a free suspension of our freedom. I cannot forget that I have
forgotten. I may have used the veil so successfully that I have
made my performance believable to myself. I may have con¬
vinced myself I am Ophelia. But credibility will never suffice
to undo the contradictoriness of self-veiling. “To believe is
to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe”
(Sartre).

If no amount of veiling can conceal the veiling itself, the
issue is how far we will go in our seriousness at self-veiling,
and how far we will go to have others act in complicity with

us.

Since finite games can be played within an infinite game,
infinite players do not eschew the performed roles of finite
play. On the contrary, they enter into finite games with all
the appropriate energy and self-veiling, but they do so without
the seriousness of finite players. They embrace the abstractness
of finite games as abstractness, and therefore take them up
not seriously, but playfully. (The term “abstract” is used here
according to Hegel's familiar definition of it as the substitution
of a part of the whole for the whole, the whole being “con-

Crete/') They freely use masks in their social engagements,
but not without acknowledging to themselves and others that
they are masked. For that reason they regard each participant
in finite play as that person playing and not as a role played
by someone.

Seriousness is always related to roles, or abstractions. We
are likely to be more serious with police officers when we
find them uniformed and performing their mandated roles
than when we find them in the process of changing into
their uniforms. Seriousness always has to do with an established
script, an ordering of affairs completed somewhere outside
the range of our influence. We are playful when we engage
others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance
where our relationship with them will come out—when, in
fact, no one has an outcome to be imposed on the relationship,
apart from the decision to continue it.

To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as
though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary,
when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons,
and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that hap¬
pens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes
itself to consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpre¬
dictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press
for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibil¬
ity whatever the cost to oneself.

There is, however, a familiar form of playfulness often asso¬
ciated with situations protected from consequence—where no
matter what we do (within certain limits), nothing will come
of it. This is not playing so much as it is playing at , a harmless
disregard for social constraints. While this is by no means
excluded from infinite play, it is not the same as infinite play.

By relating to others as they move out of their own freedom
and not out of the abstract requirements of a role, infinite

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 15

players are concrete persons engaged with concrete persons.
For that reason an infinite game cannot be abstracted, for
it is not a part of the whole presenting itself as the whole,
but the whole that knows it is the whole. We cannot say a
person played this infinite game or that, as though the rules
are independent of the concrete circumstances of play. It
can be said only that these persons played with each other
and in such a way that what they began cannot be finished.

Inasmuch as a finite game is intended for conclusion, inas¬
much as its roles are scripted and performed for an audience,
we shall refer to finite play as theatrical. Although script and
plot do not seem to be written in advance, we are always
able to look back at the path followed to victory and say of
the winners that they certainly knew how to act and what
to say.

Inasmuch as infinite players avoid any outcome whatsoever,
keeping the future open, making all scripts useless, we shall
refer to infinite play as dramatic.

Dramatically, one chooses to be a mother; theatrically, one
takes on the role of mother.

One obeys the rules in a finite game in order to play, but
playing does not consist only in obeying rules.

The rules of a finite game do not constitute a script. A
script is composed according to the rules but is not identical
to the rules. The script is the record of the actual exchanges

between players—whether acts or words—and therefore can¬
not be written down beforehand. In all true finite play the
scripts are composed in the course of play.

This means that during the game all finite play is dramatic,
since the outcome is yet unknown. That the outcome is not
known is what makes it a true game. The theatricality of
finite play has to do with the fact that there is an outcome.

Finite play is dramatic, but only provisionally dramatic.
As soon as it is concluded we are able to look backward and
see how the sequence of moves, though made freely by the
competitors, could have resulted only in this outcome. We
can see how every move fit into a sequence that made it
inevitable that this player would win.

The fact that a finite game is provisionally dramatic means
that it is the intention of each player to eliminate its drama
by making a preferred end inevitable. It is the desire of all
finite players to be Master Players , to be so perfectly skilled
in their play that nothing can surprise them, so perfectly
trained that every move in the game is foreseen at the begin¬
ning. A true Master Player plays as though the game is already
in the past, according to a script whose every detail is known
prior to the play itself.

Surprise is a crucial element in most finite games. If we
are not prepared to meet each of the possible moves of an
opponent, our chances of losing are most certainly increased.

It is therefore by surprising our opponent that we are most
likely to win. Surprise in finite play is the triumph of the
past over the future. The Master Player who already knows
what moves are to be made has a decisive advantage over

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 17

the unprepared player who does not yet know what moves
will be made.

A finite player is trained not only to anticipate every future
possibility, but to control the future, to prevent it from altering
the past. This is the finite player in the mode of seriousness
with its dread of unpredictable consequence.

Infinite players, on the other hand, continue their play in
the expectation of being surprised. If surprise is no longer
possible, all play ceases.

Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite
play to continue.

Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over
the past. Since infinite players do not regard the past as having
an outcome, they have no way of knowing what has been
begun there. With each surprise, the past reveals a new begin¬
ning in itself. Inasmuch as the future is always surprising,
the past is always changing.

Because finite players are trained to prevent the future from
altering the past, they must hide their future moves. The
unprepared opponent must be kept unprepared. Finite players
must appear to be something other than what they are. Every¬
thing about their appearance must be concealing. To appear
is not to appear. All the moves of a finite player must be
deceptive: feints, distractions, falsifications, misdirections,
mystifications.

Because infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised
by the future, they play in complete openness. It is not an
openness as in candor , but an openness as in vulnerability.
It is not a matter of exposing one's unchanging identity, the
true self that has always been, but a way of exposing one's
ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that has yet to be. The
infinite player does not expect only to be amused by surprise,

but to be transformed by it, for surprise does not alter some
abstract past, but one's own personal past.

To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be
prepared for surprise is to be educated.

Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, be¬
cause it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the
past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education
leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward
a final self-definition.

Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education
continues an unfinished past into the future.

What one wins in a finite game is a title.

A title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been
the winner of a particular game. Titles are public. They are
for others to notice. I expect others to address me according
to my titles, but 1 do not address myself with them—unless,
of course, I address myself as an other. The effectiveness of
a title depends on its visibility, its noticeabilitv to others.

Any given finite game can be played many times, although
each occasion of its occurrence is unique. The game that
was played at that time by those players can never be played
again.

Since titles are timeless, but exist only so far as they are
acknowledged, we must find means to guarantee the memory

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 19

of them. The birettas of dead cardinals are suspended from
the ceilings of cathedrals, as it were forever; the numbers of
great athletes are “retired” or withdrawn from all further play;
great achievements are carved in imperishable stone or memo¬
rialized by perpetual flames.

Some titles are inherited, though only when the bloodline
or some other tangible connection with the original winner
has been established, suggesting that the winners have contin¬
ued to exist in their descendants. The heirs to titles are there¬
fore obliged to display the appropriate emblems: a coat of
arms or identifiable styles of speech, clothing, or behavior.

It is a principal function of society to validate titles and
to assure their perpetual recognition.

It is in connection with the timelessness of titles that we
can first discern the importance of death to both finite and
infinite games and the great difference between the ways death
is understood in each.

A finite game must always be won with a terminal move,
a final act within the boundaries of the game that establishes
the winner beyond any possibility of challenge. A terminal
move results, in other words, in the death of the opposing
player as player . The winner kills the opponent. The loser
is dead in the sense of being incapable of further play.

Properly speaking, life and death as such are rarely the
stakes of a finite game. What one wins is a title; and when
the loser of a finite game is declared dead to further play, it
is equivalent to declaring that person utterly without title—

a person to whom no attention whatsoever need be given.
Death, in finite play, is the triumph of the past over the
future, a condition in which no surprise is possible.

For this reason, death for a finite player need have nothing
to do with the physical demise of the body; it is not a reference
to a corporeal state. There are two ways in which death is
commonly associated with the fate of the body: One can be
dead in life, or one can be alive in death.

Death in life is a mode of existence in which one has ceased
all play; there is no further striving for titles. All competitive
engagement with others has been abandoned. For some,
though not for all, death in life is a misfortune, the resigned
acceptance of a loser's status, a refusal to hold any title up
for recognition. For others, however, death in life can be
regarded as an achievement, the result of a spiritual discipline,
say, intended to extinguish all traces of struggle with the world,
a liberation from the need for any title whatsoever. "Die before
ye die," declare the Sufi mystics.

Life in death concerns those who are titled and whose
titles, since they are timeless, may not be extinguished by
death. Immortality, in this case, is not a reward but the condi¬
tion necessary to the possession of rewards. Victors live forever
not because their souls are unaffected by death but because
their titles must not be forgotten.

It was not merely the souls of the Egyptian pharaohs that
passed on into the afterlife, but their complete offices and
roles, along with all the tangible reminders of their earthly
triumphs—including servants put to death that they might
accompany their titled masters into eternity. For Christian
saints "death has lost its sting" not because there is something
inherently imperishable in the human soul, but because they

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 21

have fought the good fight, and they have successfully pressed
on "toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God
in Christ Jesus” (Paul).

Soldiers commonly achieve a life in death. Soldiers fight
not to stay alive but to save the nation. Those who do fight
only to protect themselves are, in fact, considered guilty of
the highest military crimes. Soldiers who die fighting the en¬
emy, however, receive the nation's highest reward: They are
declared unforgettable. Even unknown soldiers are memorial¬
ized—though their names have been lost, their titles will not
be.

What the winners of finite games achieve is not properly
an after life but an afterwor/c/, not continuing existence but
continuing recognition of their titles.

There are games in which the stakes do seem to be life
and death.

Extreme forms of bondage sometimes offer persons the priv¬
ilege of staying alive in exchange for their play—and death
for refusing to play. There is, however, something odd in
this exchange. A slave does not so much receive a life as
give a life—a life whose only function is to reflect the master's
superiority. The slave's life is the property of the master; the
slave exists only as an emblem of the master's prior victories.

A slave can have life only by giving it away. "He who
loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world
will keep it for eternal life” (Jesus).

Perhaps a more common example of such life-or-death forms
of bondage is found in those persons who resort to expensive
medical strategies to be cured of life-threatening illness. They,

too, seem to be giving life away in order to win it back. So
also are those who observe special diets or patterns of life
designed to prolong their youth and to postpone aging and
death indefinitely; they hate their life in this world now in
order that they may have it later. And just as with slaves,
the life they receive is given to them by others: doctors, yogis,
or their anonymous admirers.

When life is viewed by a finite player as the award to be
won, then death is a token of defeat. Death is not, therefore,
chosen, but inflicted. It happens to one when the struggle
against it fails. Death comes as a judgment, a dishonor, a
sign of certain weakness. Death for the finite player is deserved,
earned. "The wages of sin is death” (Paul).

If the losers are dead, the dead are also losers.

There is a contradiction here: If the prize for winning finite
play is life, then the players are not properly alive. They are
competing for life. Life, then, is not play, but the outcome
of play. Finite players play to live; they do not live their
playing. Life is therefore deserved, bestowed, possessed, won.
It is not lived. "Life itself appears only as a means to ///e”
(Marx).

This is a contradiction common to all finite play. Because
the purpose of a finite game is to bring play to an end with
the victory of one of the players, each finite game is played
to end itself. The contradiction is precisely that all finite play
is play against itself.

Death, for finite players, is abstract, not concrete. It is
not the whole person, but only an abstracted fragment of
the whole, that dies in life or lives in death.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 23

So ais life abstract for finite players. It is not the whole
person who lives. If life is a means to life, we must abstract
ourselves, but only for the sake of winning an abstraction.

Immortality, therefore, is the triumph of such abstraction.
It is a state of unrelieved theatricality. An immortal soul is
a person who cannot help but continue living out a role already
scripted. An immortal person could not choose to die nor,
for the same reason, choose to live. Immortality is serious
and in no way playful. One's actions can have no consequence
beyond themselves. There are no surprises in the afterworld.

Of course, immortality of the soul —the bare soul, cleansed
of any personality traces—is rarely what is desired in the yearn¬
ing for immortality. "The information that my soul is to last
forever could then be of no more personal concern to me
than the news that my appendix is to be preserved eternally
in a bottle" (Flew). More often what one intends to preserve
is a public personage, a permanently veiled selfhood. Immortal¬
ity is the state of forgetting that we have forgotten—that
is, overlooking the fact that we freely decided to enter into
finite play, a decision in itself playful and not serious.

Immortality is therefore the supreme example of the contra¬
dictoriness of finite play: It is a life one cannot live.

Infinite players die. Since the boundaries of death are always
part of the play, the infinite player does not die at the end
of play, but in the course of play.

The death of an infinite player is dramatic. It does not
mean that the game comes to an end with death; on the
contrary, infinite players offer their death as a way of continu¬
ing the play. For that reason they do not play for their own

life; they live for their own play. But since that play is always
with others, it is evident that infinite players both live and
die for the continuing life of others.

Where the finite player plays for immortality, the infinite
player plays as a mortal. In infinite play one chooses to be
mortal inasmuch as one always plays dramatically, that is,
toward the open, toward the horizon, toward surprise, where
nothing can be scripted. It is a kind of play that requires
complete vulnerability. To the degree that one is protected
against the future, one has established a boundary and no
longer plays with but against others.

Death is a defeat in finite play. It is inflicted when one's
boundaries give way and one falls to an opponent. The finite
player dies under the terminal move of another.

Although infinite players choose mortality, they may not
know when death comes, but we can always say of them
that “they die at the right time" (Nietzsche).

The finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life
is joyous. Infinite play resounds throughout with a kind of
laughter. It is not a laughter at others who have come to an
unexpected end, having thought they were going somewhere
else. It is laughter with others with whom we have discovered
that the end we thought we were coming to has unexpectedly
opened. We laugh not at what has surprisingly come to be
impossible for others, but over what has surprisingly come
to be possible with others.

Infinite play is inherently paradoxical , just as finite play is
inherently contradictory . Because it is the purpose of infinite
players to continue the play, they do not play for themselves.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 25

The contradiction of finite play is that the players desire to
bring play to an end for themselves. The paradox of infinite
play is that the players desire to continue the play in others.
The paradox is precisely that they play only when others go
on with the game.

Infinite players play best when they become least necessary
to the continuation of play. It is for this reason they play as
mortals.

The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning
to start something we cannot finish.

If finite players acquire titles from winning their games,
we must say of infinite players that they have nothing but
their names.

Names, like titles, are given. Persons cannot name them¬
selves any more than they can entitle themselves. However,
unlike titles, which are given for what a person has done, a
name is given at birth—at a time when a person cannot yet
have done anything. Titles are given at the end of play, names
at the beginning.

When a person is known by title, the attention is on a
completed past, on a game already concluded, and not there¬
fore to be played again. A title effectively takes a person out
of play.

When a person is known only by name, the attention of
others is on an open future. We simply cannot know what
to expect. Whenever we address each other by name we ignore
all scripts, and open the possibility that our relationship will
become deeply reciprocal. That I cannot now predict your
future is exactly what makes mine unpredictable. Our futures

enter into each other. What is your future, and mine, becomes
ours. We prepare each other for surprise.

Titles are abstractions; names are always concrete.

It can happen that when persons are distinctly identified
as winners their names can have the force of titles. We some¬
times act "to clear our name” of aspersions, or to defend
the "good name of our family.” Names can even become
titles in the formal sense, such as "Caesar,” or "Napoleon,”
or "the name of Jesus which is above every name” (Paul).
When Jesus is regarded by way of a title instead of a name,
he becomes an abstracted, theatrical role, a person with whom
we can share no future, rather a Master Player in whose future
we live in a manner that has already been scripted, or decided,
for us. "Before Abraham was, I am,” Jesus said of himself
in the Gospel of John.

Titles, then, point backward in time. They have their origin
in an unrepeatable past.

Titles are theatrical. Each title has a specified ceremonial
form of address and behavior. Titles such as Captain, Mrs.,
Lord, Esquire, Professor, Comrade, Father, Under Secretary,
signal not only a mode of address with its appropriate defer¬
ence or respect, but also a content of address (only certain
subjects are suitable for discussion with the Admiral of the
Fleet or the District Attorney or the Holy Mother), and a
manner of address (shaking hands, kneeling, prostrating or
crossing oneself, saluting, bowing, averting the eyes, or stand¬
ing in silence).

The mode and content of address and the manner of behav¬
ior are recognitions of the areas in which titled persons are

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 27

no longer in competition. There are precise ways in which
one may no longer compete with the Dalai Lama or the Heavy¬
weight Champion of the World. There is no possible action
by which one may deprive them of their titles to contests
now in the past. Therefore, insofar as we recognize their titles
we withdraw from any contest with them in those areas.

The titled are powerful. Those around them are expected
to yield, to withdraw their opposition, and to conform to
their will—in the arena in which the title was won.

The exercise of power always presupposes resistance. Power
is never evident until two or more elements are in opposition.
Whichever element can move another is the more powerful.
If no one else ever strove to be a Boddhisattva or the Baton
Twirling Champion of the State of Indiana, those titles would
be powerless—no one would defer to them.

The exercise of power also presupposes a closed field and
finite units of time. My power is determined by the amount
of resistance I can displace within given spatial and temporal
limits . The question is not whether I can lift ten pounds,
but whether I can lift ten pounds five feet off the ground
in one second—or within some other precise limitation of
time and space. The establishment of the limits makes it
possible to know how powerful I am in relation to others.

Power is always measured in units of comparison. In fact,
it is a term of competition: How much resistance can I over¬
come relative to others?

Power is a concept that belongs only in finite play. But
power is not properly measurable until the game is com¬
pleted—until the designated period of time has run out. Dur-

ing the course of play we cannot yet determine the power
of the players, because to the degree that it is genuine play
the outcome is unknown. A player who is being pushed all
over the field by an apparently superior opponent may display
an unsuspected burst of activity at the end and take the victory.
Until the final hours of the count in the presidential election
of 1948 many Americans thought that Harry Truman was a
far weaker candidate than Thomas Dewey.

To speak meaningfully of a person’s power is to speak of
what that person has already completed in one or another
closed field. To see power is to look backward in time.

Inasmuch as power is determined by the outcome of a
game, one does not win by being powerful; one wins to be
powerful. If one has sufficient power to win before the game
has begun, what follows is not a game at all.

One can be powerful only through the possession of an
acknowledged title—that is, only by the ceremonial deference
of others. Power is never one’s own, and in that respect it
shows the contradiction inherent in all finite play. I can be
powerful only by not playing, by showing that the game is
over. I can therefore have only what powers others give me.
Power is bestowed by an audience after the play is complete.

Power is contradictory, and theatrical.

It may seem implausible to claim that power is a matter
of deference to titles. If anything appears to be a permanent
feature of reality it is power—the constant impingement on
us of superior forces both without and within. Everything
from changes in the weather and acts of national governments
to the irresistible push of instinct and the process of aging

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 29

seems to confirm us as helpless creatures of circumstance—
and to that degree powerless. It seems plainly false to say
that power is theatrical.

And yet, the theatrical nature of power seems to be consis¬
tent with the principle arrived at earlier: Whoever must play
cannot play. The intuitive idea in that principle is that no
one can engage us competitively unless we fully cooperate,
unless we join the game and join it to win. Because power
is measurable only in comparative—that is, competitive—
terms, it presupposes some kind of cooperation. If we defer
to titled winners, it is only because we regard ourselves as
losers. To do so is freely to take part in the theater of power.

There certainly are acts of government, or acts of nature,
or acts of god that far exceed any contravening ability of
our own, but it is unlikely that we would consider ourselves
losers in relation to them. We are not defeated by floods or
genetic disease or the rate of inflation. It is true that these
are real , but we do not play against reality; we play according
to reality. We do not eliminate weather or genetic influence
but accept them as the realities that establish the context
of play, the limits within which we are to play.

If I accept death as inevitable, I do not struggle against
mortality. I struggle as a mortal.

All the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.

Power is a feature only of finite games. It is not dramatic
but theatrical. How then do infinite players contend with
power? Infinite play is always dramatic; its outcome is endlessly
open. There is no way of looking back to make a definitive
assessment of the power or weakness of earlier play. Infinite

players look forward, not to a victory in which the past will
achieve a timeless meaning, but toward ongoing play in which
the past will require constant reinterpretation. Infinite players
do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of
their own in such a way that others will respond by initiating
their own.

We need a term that will stand in contrast to “power”
as it acquires its meaning in finite play. Let us say that where
the finite player plays to be powerful the infinite player plays
with strength.

A powerful person is one who brings the past to an outcome,
settling all its unresolved issues. A strong person is one who
carries the past into the future, showing that none of its issues
is capable of resolution. Power is concerned with what has
already happened; strength with what has yet to happen.
Power is finite in amount. Strength cannot be measured, be¬
cause it is an opening and not a closing act. Power refers to
the freedom persons have within limits, strength to the free¬
dom persons have with limits.

Power will always be restricted to a relatively small number
of selected persons. Anyone can be strong.

Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force
others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them ,
but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the
course of my play with them.

Although anyone who wishes can be an infinite player, and
although anyone can be strong, we are not to suppose that
power cannot work irremediable damage on infinite play. Infi¬
nite play cannot prevent or eliminate evil. Though infinite

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 31

players are strong, they are not powerful and do not attempt
to become powerful.

Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite play
coming to an end in unheard silence.

Unheard silence does not necessarily mean the death of
the player. Unheard silence is not the loss of the player's
voice, but the loss of listeners for that voice. It is an evil
when the drama of a life does not continue in others for
reason of their deafness or ignorance.

There are silences that can be heard, even from the dead
and from the severely oppressed. Much is recoverable from
an apparently forgotten past. Sensitive and faithful historians
can learn much of what has been lost, and much therefore
that can be continued.

There are silences, however, that will never and can never
be heard. There is much evil that remains beyond redemption.
When Europeans first landed on the North American conti¬
nent the native population spoke as many as ten thousand
distinct languages, each with its own poetry and treasury of
histories and myths, its own ways of living in harmony with
the spontaneities of the natural environment. All but a very
few of those tongues have been silenced, their cultures forever
lost to those of us who stand ignorantly in their place.

Evil is not the termination of a finite game. Finite players,
even those who play for their own lives, know the stakes of
the games they freely choose to play.

Evil is not the attempt to eliminate the play of another
according to published and accepted rules, but to eliminate
the play of another regardless of the rules. Evil is not the
acquisition of power, but the expression of power. It is the
forced recognition of a title—and therein lies the contradiction
of evil, for recognition cannot be forced. The Nazis did not
compete with the Jews for a title, but demanded recognition

of a title without competition. This could be achieved, how¬
ever, only by silencing the Jews, only by hearing nothing from
them. They were to die in silence, along with their culture,
without anyone noticing, not even those who managed the
institutions and instruments of death.

Evil is never intended as evil. Indeed, the contradiction
inherent in all evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate
evil. "The only good Indian is a dead Indian/'

Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied
up, brought to a sensible conclusion. It is evil to act as though
the past is bringing us to a specifiable end. It is evil to assume
that the past will make sense only if we bring it to an issue
we have clearly in view. It is evil for a nation to believe it
is "the last, best hope on earth." It is evil to think history
is to end with a return to Zion, or with the classless society,
or with the Islamicization of all living infidels.

Your history does not belong to me. We live with each
other in a common history.

Infinite players understand the inescapable likelihood of
evil. They therefore do not attempt to eliminate evil in others,
for to do so is the very impulse of evil itself, and therefore
a contradiction. They only attempt paradoxically to recognize
in themselves the evil that takes the form of attempting to
eliminate evil elsewhere.

Evil is not the inclusion of finite games in an infinite game,
but the restriction of all play to one or another finite game.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 33

TWO

No One Can
Play a Game
Alone

No one can play a game alone. One cannot be human by
oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community.
We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are
who we are in relating to others.

Simultaneously the others with whom we are in relation
are themselves in relation. We cannot relate to anyone who
is not also relating to us. Our social existence has, therefore,
an inescapably fluid character. This is not to say that we
live in a fluid context, but that our lives are themselves fluid.
As in the Zen image we are not the stones over which the
stream of the world flows; we are the stream itself. As we
shall see, this ceaseless change does not mean discontinuity;
rather change is itself the very basis of our continuity as per¬
sons. Only that which can change can continue: this is the
principle by which infinite players live.

The fluidity of our social and therefore personal existence
is a function of our essential freedom—the kind of freedom
indicated in the formula "Who must play, cannot play.” Of
course, as we have seen, finite games cannot have fluid bound¬
aries, for if they do it will be impossible to agree on winners.
But finite games float, as it were, in the unconstrained choice
each player makes in entering and continuing the play. Finite

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 37

games sometimes appear, therefore, to have fixed points of
social reference. Not only are there true and false ways of
loving your country, for example; there is a positive require¬
ment that you do so.

It is this essential fluidity of our humanness that is irreconcil¬
able with the seriousness of finite play. It is, therefore, this
fluidity that presents us with an unavoidable challenge: how
to contain the serious within the truly playful; that is, how
to keep all our finite games in infinite play.

This challenge is commonly misunderstood as the need to
find room for playfulness within finite games. This is what
was referred to above as playing at, or perhaps playing around,
a kind of play that has no consequence. This is the sort of
playfulness implied in the ordinary sense of such terms as
entertainment, amusement, diversion, comic relief, recreation,
relaxation. Inevitably, however, seriousness will creep back into
this kind of play. The executive's vacation, like the football
team's time out, comes to be a device for refreshing the contes¬
tant for a higher level of competition. Even the open playful¬
ness of children is exploited through organized athletic,
artistic, and educational regimens as a means of preparing
the young for serious adult competition.

When Bismarck described politics as the art of the possible,
he meant, of course, that the possible is to be found somewhere
within fixed limits, within social realities. He plainly did not
mean that the possible extended to those limits themselves.
Such a politics is therefore seriousness itself, especially since
politicians of nearly every ideology represent themselves as
champions of freedom, doing what is necessary and even dis-

tasteful toward the end of enlarging the range of the possible.
"We must learn the fine arts of war and independence so
that our children can learn architecture and engineering so
that their children may learn the fine arts and painting” (John
Quincy Adams).

The interest of infinite players has little in common with
such politics, since they are not concerned to find how much
freedom is available within the given realities—for this is free¬
dom only in the trivial sense of playing at—but are concerned
to show how freely we have decided to place these particular
boundaries around our finite play. They remind us that political
realities do not precede, but follow from, the essential fluidity
of our humanness.

This does not mean that infinite players are politically disen¬
gaged; it means rather that they are political without having
a politics, a paradoxical position easily misinterpreted. To have
a politics is to have a set of rules by which one attempts to
reach a desired end; to be political—in the sense meant here—
is to recast rules in the attempt to eliminate all societal ends,
that is, to maintain the essential fluidity of human association.

To be political in the mode of infinite play is by no means
to disregard the appalling conditions under which many hu¬
man beings live, the elimination of which is the professed
end of much politics. We can imagine infinite players nodding
thoughtfully at Rousseau's famous declaration: "Man is born
free, and everywhere he is in chains.” They can see that the
dream of freedom is universal, that wars are fought to win
it, heroes die to protect it, and songs are written to commemo¬
rate its attainment. But in the infinite player's vision of politi¬
cal affairs the element of intentionality and willfulness, so
easily obscured in the exigencies of public crisis, stands out
in clear relief. Therefore, even warfare and heroism are seen
with their self-contradictions in full display. No nation can

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 39

go to war until it has found another that can agree to the
terms of the conflict. Each side must therefore be in complicity
with the other: Before I can have an enemy, I must persuade
another to recognize me as an enemy. I cannot be a hero
unless I can first find someone who will threaten my life—
or, better, take my life. Once under way, warfare and acts
of heroism have all the appearance of necessity, but that ap¬
pearance is but a veil over the often complicated maneuvers
by which the antagonists have arranged their conflict with
each other.

Therefore, for infinite players, politics is a form of theatrical¬
ity. It is the performance of roles before an audience, according
to a script whose last scene is known in advance by the perform¬
ers. The United States did not, for example, lose its war in
Southeast Asia so much as lose its audience for a war. No
doubt much of the disillusion and bitterness of its warriors
comes from the missing final scene—the hero's homecoming
to parades or ceremonial burial—an anticipated scene that
carries many into battle.

It is because of the essential theatricality of politics that
infinite players do not take sides in political issues—at least
not seriously. Instead they enter into social conflict dramati¬
cally, attempting to offer a vision of continuity and open-
endedness in place of the heroic final scene. In doing so they
must at the very least draw the attention of other political
participants not to what they feel they must do, but to why
they feel they must do it.

In their own political engagements infinite players make
a distinction between society and culture. Society they under¬
stand as the sum of those relations that are under some form
of public constraint, culture as whatever we do with each
other by undirected choice. If society is all that a people
feels it must do, culture “is the realm of the variable, free,

not necessarily universal, of all that cannot lay claim to compul¬
sive authority” (Burckhardt).

The infinite player's understanding of society is not to be
confused with, say, natural instinct, or any other form of invol¬
untary activity. Society remains entirely within our free choice
in quite the same way that finite competition, however strenu¬
ous or costly to the player, never prevents the player from
walking off the field of play. Society applies only to those
areas of action which are believed to be necessary.

Just as infinite play cannot be contained within finite play,
culture cannot be authentic if held within the boundaries
of a society. Of course, it is often the strategy of a society
to initiate and embrace a culture as exclusively its own. Culture
so bounded may even be so lavishly subsidized and encouraged
by society that it has the appearance of open-ended activity,
but in fact it is designed to serve societal interests in every
case—like the socialist realism of Soviet art.

Society and culture are therefore not true opponents of
each other. Rather society is a species of culture that persists
in contradicting itself, a freely organized attempt to conceal
the freedom of the organizers and the organized, an attempt
to forget that we have willfully forgotten our decision to enter
this or that contest and to continue in it.

If we think of society as all that a people does under the
veil of necessity, we must also think of it as a single finite
game that includes any number of smaller games within its
boundaries.

A large society will consist of a wide variety of games—
though all somehow connected, inasmuch as they have a bear-

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 41

ing on a final societal ranking. Schools are a species of finite
play to the degree that they bestow ranked awards on those
who win degrees from them. Those awards in turn qualify
graduates for competition in still higher games—certain presti¬
gious colleges, for example, and then certain professional
schools beyond that, with a continuing sequence of higher
games in each of the professions, and so forth. It is not uncom¬
mon for families to think of themselves as a competitive unit
in a broader finite game for which they are training their
members in the struggle for societally visible titles.

Like a finite game, a society is numerically, spatially, and
temporally limited. Its citizenship is precisely defined, its
boundaries are inviolable, and its past is enshrined.

The power of citizens in a society is determined by their
ranking in games that have been played. A society preserves
its memory of past winners. Its record-keeping functions are
crucial to societal order. Large bureaucracies grow out of the
need to verify the numerous entitlements of the citizens of
that society.

The power of a society is determined by its victory over
other societies in still larger finite games. Its most treasured
memories are those of the heroes fallen in victorious battles
with other societies. Heroes of lost battles are almost never
memorialized. Foch has his monument, but not Petain; Lin¬
coln, but not Jefferson Davis; Lenin, but not Trotsky.

The power in a society is guaranteed and enhanced by
the power of a society.

The prizes won by its citizens can be protected only if
the society as a whole remains powerful in relation to other
societies. Those who desire the permanence of their prizes
will work to sustain the permanence of the whole. Patriotism
in one or several of its many forms (chauvinism, racism, sexism,
nationalism, regionalism) is an ingredient in all societal play.

Because power is inherently patriotic, it is characteristic
of finite players to seek a growth of power in a society as a
way of increasing the power of a society. It is in the interest
of a society therefore to encourage competition within itself,
to establish the largest possible number of prizes, for the hold¬
ers of prizes will be those most likely to defend the society
as a whole against its competitors.

Culture, on the other hand, is an infinite game. Culture
has no boundaries. Anyone can be a participant in a culture—
anywhere and at any time.

Because a society maintains careful temporal limits, it under¬
stands its past as destiny; that is, its course of history lies
between a definitive beginning (the founders of a society are
always especially memorialized) and a definitive ending. (The
nature of its victory is repeatedly anticipated in official declara¬
tions; “to each according to their need, from each according
to their ability,” for example.)

Because culture as such can have no temporal limits, a
culture understands its past not as destiny, but as history,
that is, as a narrative that has begun but points always toward
the endlessly open. Culture is an enterprise of mortals, disdain¬
ing to protect themselves against surprise. Living in the
strength of their vision, they eschew power and make joyous
play of boundaries.

Society is a manifestation of power. It is theatrical, having
an established script. Deviations from the script are evident
at once. Deviation is antisocietal and therefore forbidden by
society under a variety of sanctions. It is easy to see why
deviancy is to be resisted. If persons did not adhere to the

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 43

standing rules of the society, any number of rules would
change, and some would be dropped altogether. This would
mean that past winners no longer warrant ceremonial recogni¬
tion of their titles and are therefore without power—like Rus¬
sian princes after the Revolution.

It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes
in the rules of the many games it embraces. Such procedures
as academic accreditation, licensure of trades and professions,
synodical ordination, parliamentary confirmation of official ap¬
pointments, and the inauguration of political leaders are acts
of the larger society allowing persons to compete in the finite
games within it.

Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever
merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is cultur¬
ally impoverished.

There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all diver¬
gence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to
vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing
it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater signif¬
icance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition
into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as
unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have
been—and therefore of all that we are.

Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but contin¬
ues what was begun and not finished in the past. Societal
convention, on the other hand, requires that a completed
past be repeated in the future. Society has all the seriousness
of immortal necessity; culture resounds with the laughter of
unexpected possibility. Society is abstract, culture concrete.

Finite games can be played again; they can be played an
indefinite number of times. It is true that the winners of a
game are always the winners of a game played at that particular
time, but the validity of their titles depends on the repeatabil-

ity of that game. We memorialize early football greats but
would not do so if football had vanished after its first decade.

As we have seen, because an infinite game cannot be brought
to an end, it cannot be repeated. Unrepeatability is a character¬
istic of culture everywhere. Mozart's Jupiter Symphony cannot
be composed again, nor could Rembrandt's self-portraits be
painted twice. Society preserves these works as the prizes of
those who have triumphed in their respective games. Culture,
however, does not consider the works as the outcome of a
struggle, but as moments in an ongoing struggle—the very
struggle that culture is. Culture continues what Mozart and
Rembrandt had themselves continued by way of their work:
an original, or deviant, shaping of the tradition they received,
original enough that it does not invite duplication of itself
by others, but invites the originality of others in response.

Just as an infinite game has rules, a culture has a tradition.
Since the rules of play in an infinite game are freely agreed
to and freely altered, a cultural tradition is both adopted and
transformed in its adoption.

Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it
is a tradition.

It is essential to the identity of a society to forget that it
has forgotten that society is always a species of culture. Its
citizens must find ways of persuading themselves that their
own particular boundaries have been imposed on them, and
were not freely chosen by them. For example, it is one thing
for persons to choose to be Americans, quite another for per¬
sons to choose to be America. Societal thinking easily permits
the former, never the latter.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 45

One of the most effective means of self-persuasion available
to a citizenry is the bestowal of property. Who actually owns
a society's property, and how it is distributed, are far less
important than the fact that property exists at all. To under¬
stand the peculiar dynamic of property we must return to
one of the features of finite play.

What the winner of a finite game wins is a title. A title
is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner
of a particular game. I cannot entitle myself. Titles are theatri¬
cal, requiring an audience to bestow and respect them. Power
attaches to titles inasmuch as those who acknowledge them
accept the fact that the struggle in which the titles were
won cannot be taken up again. Possession of the title signifies
an agreement that competition is forever closed in that particu¬
lar game.

It is therefore essential to the effectiveness of every title
that it be visible and that in its visibility it point back at
the contest in which it was won. The purpose of property is
to make our titles visible. Property is emblematic. It recalls
to others those areas in which our victories are beyond chal¬
lenge.

Property may be stolen, but the thief does not therefore
own it. Ownership can never be stolen. Titles are timeless,
and so is the ownership of property. Nations will sometimes
go to war over claims to the ownership of land that go back
many centuries. Titles can be inherited, and when they are
there is an appropriate transfer of property to the heir—who
must, of course, possess the very worthiness by which the
inheritor originally secured the title. (An inheritance can often
be legally challenged by demonstrating the heir's incompe¬
tence or immorality.)

A thief, however, does not mean to steal the title. A thief
does not want to take what belongs to someone else. The

thief does not compete with me for the articles I have title
to, but for the title to those articles. The thief means to
win the title, believing that those things to which I claim
title belong to no one and are there for the taking. "If you
don't take pocket-handkechers and watches," explains the Art¬
ful Dodger to Oliver, "some other cove will; so that the coves
that lost 'em will be all the worse, and you'll be all the worse
too and nobody half a ha'p'orth the better, except the chaps
wot gets them—and you've just as good a right to them as
they have."

One reason for the necessity of a society is its role in ascrib¬
ing and validating the titles to property. "The great and chief
end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and
putting themselves under Government, is the preservation
of their Property; to which in the state of nature there are
many things wanting" (Locke).

When we ask precisely how a society will go about preserv¬
ing its citizens' property, we can expect the reply that it will
do so by the use of force. This reply introduces a dilemma.
While it is true that there are ways of forcibly restraining a
thief, it is also true that no amount of force can lead the
Artful Dodger truly to acknowledge a gentleman's title to
the handkerchief in his pocket. Until the young ruffian is
persuaded freely to respect that title, he will remain a thief.
By extension, this observation applies to the society as a whole.
There is no effective pattern of entitlement in a society short
of the free agreement of all opponents that the titles to prop¬
erty are in the hands of the actual winners.

No force will establish this agreement. Indeed, the opposite

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 47

is the case: It is agreement that establishes force. Only those
who consent to a society's constraints see them as constraints—
that is, as guides to action and not as actions to be opposed.

Those who challenge the existing pattern of entitlements
in a society do not consider the designated officers of enforce¬
ment powerful; they consider them opponents in a struggle
that will determine by its outcome who is powerful. One
does not win by power; one wins to be powerful.

Only by free self-concealment can persons believe they obey
the law because the law is powerful; in fact, the law is powerful
for persons only because they obey it. We do not proceed
through a traffic intersection because the signal changes, but
when the signal changes.

This means that a peculiar burden falls on property owners.
Since the laws protecting their property will be effective only
when they are able to persuade others to obey those laws,
they must introduce a theatricality into their ownership suffi¬
ciently engaging that their opponents will live by its script.

The theatricality of property has, in fact, an elaborate struc¬
ture that property owners must be at considerable labor to
sustain. If property is to be persuasively emblematic, that is,
if it is to draw attention to the owner's titles in past victories,
a double burden falls on its owners:

First, they must show that the amount of their property
corresponds to the difficulty they were under in winning title
to it. Property must be seen as compensation.

Second, they must show that the type of their property
corresponds to the nature of the competition by which title
to it was won. Property must be seen to be consumed.

Property is appropriately compensatory whenever owners
can show that what is gained is no more than what was ex¬
pended in the effort to acquire it. There must be an equiva¬
lency between what the owners have given of themselves and
what they have received from others by way of their titles.

Whoever is unable to show a correspondence between
wealth and the risks undergone to acquire it, or the talents
spent in its acquisition, will soon face a challenge over entitle¬
ment. The rich are regularly subject to theft, to taxation, to
the expectation that their wealth be shared, as though what
they have is not true compensation and therefore not com¬
pletely theirs.

To be fully compensated for what one gave of oneself in
the struggle for a title is to be restored to the condition one
was in prior to competition.

Property is an attempt to recover the past. It returns one
to precompetitive status. One is compensated for the amount
of time spent (and thus lost) in competition.

This attempt to recover the past is, however, a theatrical
attempt which can succeed only to the degree that it is conspic¬
uous to its audience. Property must take up space. It must
be somewhere—and somewhere obvious. That is, it must exist
in such a form that others will come upon it and take notice
of it. Our property must intrude on another, stand in another's
way, causing one to contend with it. Propertied persons typi¬
cally have large estates and freedom of movement through
the society. At the same time, the property of the rich has
the effect of crowding and confining the less propertied. The
very poor are typically restricted to narrow geographical limits
and are regarded as aliens outside them.

What is at stake here for owners is not the amount of

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 49

property as such, but its ability to draw an audience for whom
it will be appropriately emblematc; that is, an audience who
will see it as just compensation for the effort and skill used
in acquiring it.

There is a second theatrical requirement that falls on the
owners of property. Once they have drawn attention to what
they have lost in acquiring what they own, they must then
consume what they have gained in a way that recovers the
loss. The intuitive principle here is that we cannot be justified
in owning what we do not need to use or plan to use. One
does not earn money merely to store it away where it will
be protected from all possible future use.

Consumption is to be understood as an intentional activity.
One does not consume property simply by destroying it—
else burning our earned money would suffice—but by using
it up in a certain way.

Consumption is a kind of activity that is directly opposite
to the very form of engagement by which the title was won.
It must be the kind of activity that can convince all observers
that the possessed title to it is no longer in question.

The more powerful we consider persons to be, the less
we expect them to do, for their power can come only from
that which they have done. After athletic contests in which
major titles have been at stake, it is common for the audience
to lift the winners to their shoulders, marching them about
as if they were helpless—in the sharpest possible contrast to
the physical skill and energy they have just displayed. Mon-

archs and divinities are often borne on ceremonial transports;
the very wealthy are driven in carriages or limousines.

Consumption is an activity so different from gainful labor
that it shows itself in the mode of leisure, even indolence.
We display the success of what we have done by not having
to do anything. The more we use up, therefore, the more
we show ourselves to be winners of past contests. "Conspicuous
abstention from labour therefore becomes the conventional
mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional
index of reputability; and conversely, since application to pro¬
ductive labour is a mark of poverty and subjection, it becomes
inconsistent with a reputable standing in the community"
(Veblen).

Just as compensation makes itself conspicuous by taking
up space, consumption draws attention to itself by the length
of time it continues. Property must not only intrude on others,
it must continue to intrude on others. The amount of property
we have is measurable according to the length of time we
remain conspicuous, requiring others to adjust their freedom
of movement to our spatial dimensions. It is the common
goal of the rich to establish a mode of visibility that will
extend itself over generations by executing wills that prevent
the rapid exhaustion of their fortune, by endowing societally
important institutions, by erecting great buildings in their
name. Persons of small victories, of lower rank, do not have
property of great temporal value; what they have will be ex¬
hausted quickly. Those persons whose victories the society
wishes never to forget are given prominent and eternal monu¬
ments at the heart of its capital cities, often taking up consider¬
able space, diverting traffic, and standing in the path of casual
strollers.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 51

It is apparent to infinite players that wealth is not so much
possessed as it is performed.

If one of the reasons for uniting into commonwealths is
the protection of property, and if property is to be protected
less by power as such than by theater, then societies become
acutely dependent on their artists—what Plato called poietai:
the storytellers, the inventors, sculptors, poets, any original
thinkers whatsoever.

It is certainly the case that no gentleman will find the
Artful Dodger's hand in his pocket so long as it is in the
forceful grip of an officer of the law. But any policy of forceful
restraint so extreme that it requires an officer for each potential
criminal is a formula for quick descent into social chaos.

Some societies develop the belief that they can eliminate
thievery by guaranteeing all their members, including thieves,
a certain amount of property—the impulse behind much social
welfare legislation. But putting a coin into the pocket of the
Artful Dodger will hardly convince him that he is no longer
a legitimate contender for the coin in mine.

The more effective policy for a society is to find ways of
persuading its thieves to abandon their role as competitors
for property for the sake of becoming audience to the theater
of wealth. It is for this reason that societies fall back on the
skill of those poietai who can theatricalize the property rela¬
tions, and indeed, all the inner structures of each society.

Societal theorists of any subtlety whatever know that such
theatricalization must be taken with great seriousness. With¬
out it there is no culture at all, and a society without culture
would be too drab and lifeless to be endured. What would

Nazism have been without its musicians, graphic artists, and
set designers, without its Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl?
Even the rigid authoritarian shell of Plato's Republic will be
“filled with a multitude of things which are no longer necessi¬
ties, as for example all kinds of hunters and artists, many of
them concerned with shapes and colors, many with music;
poets and their auxiliaries, actors, choral dancers, and contrac¬
tors; and makers of all kinds of instruments, including those
needed for the beautification of women" (Plato).

If wealth and might are to be performed, great wealth and
great might must be performed brilliantly.

While societal thinkers may not overlook the importance
of poiesis, or creative activity, neither may they underestimate
its danger, for the poietai are the ones most likely to remember
what has been forgotten—that society is a species of culture.

Societies commonly treat their poietai with considerable
ambivalence. The governing bodies of the Soviet Union do
not believe that all genuine art must conform to the standards
of socialist realism, but they do believe it is always possible
to find true art that is compatible with socialist realism; there¬
fore, those artists whose works do not conform to that line
may be punished without affecting the integrity of art as such.
Plato did not expect his artists to compromise their art, but
he did say that there must be “general lines which the poietai
must follow in their stories. These lines they will not be able
to cross."

The deepest and most consequent struggle of each society
is therefore not with other societies, but with the culture
that exists within itself—the culture that is itself. Conflict

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 53

with other societies is, in fact, an effective way for a society
to restrain its own culture. Powerful societies do not silence
their poietai in order that they may go to war; they go to
war as a way of silencing their poietai. Original thinkers can
be suppressed through execution and exile, or they can be
encouraged through subsidy and flattery to praise the society's
heroes. Alexander and Napoleon took their poets and their
scholars into battle with them, saving themselves the nuisance
of repression and along the way drawing ever larger audiences
to their triumph.

Another successful defense of society against the culture
within itself is to give artists a place by regarding them as
the producers of property, thus elevating the value of consum¬
ing art, or owning it. It is notable that very large collections
of art, and all the world's major museums, are the work of
the very rich or of societies during strongly nationalistic peri¬
ods. All the principal museums in New York, for example,
are associated with the names of the famously rich: Carnegie,
Frick, Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Whitney, Morgan, Lehman.

Such museums are not designed to protect the art from
people, but to protect the people from art.

Culture is likely to break out in a society not when its
poietai begin to voice a line contrary to that of the society,
but when they begin to ignore all lines whatsoever and concern
themselves with bringing the audience back into play—not
competitive play, but play that affirms itself as play.

What confounds a society is not serious opposition, but
the lack of seriousness altogether. Generals can more easily

suffer attempts to oppose their warfare with poiesis than at¬
tempts to show warfare as poiesis.

Art that is used against a society or its policies gives up
its character as infinite play, and aims for an end. Such art
is no less propaganda than that which praises its heroes with
high seriousness. Once warfare, or any other societal activity,
has been taken into the infinite play of poiesis so that it
appears to be either comical or pointless (in the way that,
say, beauty is pointless), there is an acute danger that the
soldiers will find no audience for their prizes, and therefore
no reason to fight for them.

Since culture is itself a poiesis, all of its participants are
poietai—inventors, makers, artists, storytellers, mythologists.
They are not, however, makers of actualities, but makers of
possibilities. The creativity of culture has no outcome, no
conclusion. It does not result in art works, artifacts, products.
Creativity is a continuity that engenders itself in others. “Art¬
ists do not create objects, but create by way of objects” (Rank).

Art is not art, therefore, except as it leads to an engendering
creativity in its beholders. Whoever takes possession of the
objects of art has not taken possession of the art.

Since art is never possession, and always possibility, nothing
possessed can have the status of art. If art cannot become
property, property is never art—as property. Property draws
attention to titles, points backward toward a finished time.
Art is dramatic, opening always forward, beginning something
that cannot be finished.

Because it is not conclusive, but engendering, culture has

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 55

no established catalogue of acceptable activities. We are not
artists by reason of having mastered certain skills or exercising
specified techniques. Art has no scripted roles for its perform¬
ers. It is precisely because it has none that it is art. Artistry
can be found anywhere; indeed, it can only be found anywhere.
One must be surprised by it. It cannot be looked for. We
do not watch artists to see what they do, but watch what
persons do and discover the artistry in it.

Artists cannot be trained. One does not become an artist
by acquiring certain skills or techniques, though one can use
any number of skills and techniques in artistic activity. The
creative is found in anyone who is prepared for surprise. Such
a person cannot go to school to be an artist, but can only
go to school as an artist.

Therefore, poets do not “fit” into society, not because a
place is denied them but because they do not take their
“places” seriously. They openly see its roles as theatrical, its
styles as poses, its clothing costumes, its rules conventional,
its crises arranged, its conflicts performed, and its metaphysics
ideological.

To regard society as a species of culture is not to overthrow
or even alter society, but only to eliminate its perceived neces¬
sity. Infinite players have rules; they just do not forget that
rules are an expression of agreement and not a requirement
for agreement.

Culture is not therefore mere disorder. Infinite players never
understand their culture as the composite of all that they
choose individually to do, but as the congruence of all that

they choose to do with each other. Because there is no congru¬
ence without the decision to have one, all cultural congruence
is under constant revision. No sooner did the Renaissance
begin than it began to change. Indeed, the Renaissance was
not something apart from its change; it was itself a certain
persistent and congruent evolution.

For this reason it can be said that where a society is defined
by its boundaries , a culture is defined by its horizon.

A boundary is a phenomenon of opposition. It is the meeting
place of hostile forces. Where nothing opposes there can be
no boundary. One cannot move beyond a boundary without
being resisted.

This is why patriotism—that is, the desire to protect the
power in a society by way of increasing the power of a society—
is inherently belligerent. Since there can be no prizes without
a society, no society without opponents, patriots must create
enemies before we can require protection from them. Patriots
can flourish only where boundaries are well-defined, hostile,
and dangerous. The spirit of patriotism is therefore characteris¬
tically associated with the military or other modes of interna¬
tional conflict.

Because patriotism is the desire to contain all other finite
games within itself—that is, to embrace all horizons within
a single boundary—it is inherently evil.

A horizon is a phenomenon of vision. One cannot look
at the horizon; it is simply the point beyond which we cannot
see. There is nothing in the horizon itself, however, that limits
vision, for the horizon opens onto all that lies beyond itself.
What limits vision is rather the incompleteness of that vision.

One never reaches a horizon. It is not a line; it has no
place; it encloses no field; its location is always relative to
the view. To move toward a horizon is simply to have a new

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 57

horizon. One can therefore never be dose to one's horizon,
though one may certainly have a short range of vision, a narrow
horizon.

We are never somewhere in relation to the horizon since
the horizon moves with our vision. We can only be somewhere
by turning away from the horizon, by replacing vision with
opposition, by declaring the place on which we stand to be
timeless—a sacred region, a holy land, a body of truth, a
code of inviolable commandments. To be somewhere is to
absolutize time, space, and number.

Every move an infinite player makes is toward the horizon.
Every move made by a finite player is within a bound¬
ary. Every moment of an infinite game therefore presents a
new vision, a new range of possibilities. The Renaissance,
like all genuine cultural phenomena, was not an effort to pro¬
mote one or another vision. It was an effort to find visions
that promised still more vision.

Who lives horizonally is never somewhere, but always in
passage.

Since culture is horizonal it is not restricted by time or
space.

To the degree that the Renaissance was true culture it
has not ended. Anyone may enter into its mode of renewing
vision. This does not mean that we repeat what was done.
To enter a culture is not to do what the others do, but to
do whatever one does with the others.

This is why every new participant in a culture both enters
into an existing context and simultaneously changes that con¬
text. Each new speaker of its language both learns the language

and alters it. Each new adoption of a tradition makes it a
new tradition—just as the family into which a child is born
existed prior to that birth, but is nonetheless a new family
after the birth.

The reciprocity of this transformation has no respect to
time. The fact that the Renaissance began in the fourteenth
or fifteenth century has nothing to do with its capacity for
changing our horizon. This reciprocity works backward as well
as forward. Each person whose horizon is affected by the
Renaissance affects the horizon of the Renaissance in turn.
Any culture that continues to influence our vision continues
to grow in the very exercise of that influence.

Since a culture is not anything persons do, but anything
they do with each other, we may say that a culture comes
into being whenever persons choose to be a people. It is as
a people that they arrange their rules with each other, their
moralities, their modes of communication.

Properly speaking, the Renaissance is not a period but a
people, moreover, a people without a boundary, and therefore
without an enemy. The Renaissance is not against anyone.
Whoever is not of the Renaissance cannot go out to oppose
it, for they will find only an invitation to join the people it
is.

A culture is sometimes opposed by suppressing its ideas,
its works, even its language. This is a common strategy of a
society afraid of the culture growing within its boundaries.
But it is a strategy certain to fail, because it confuses the
creative activity (poiesis) with the product (poiema) of that
activity.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 59

Societies characteristically separate the ideas from their
thinkers, the poiema from its poietes. A society abstracts its
thought and grants power to certain ideas as though they
had an existence of their own independent from those who
think them, even those who first produced them. In fact, a
society is likely to have an idea of itself that no thinker may
challenge or revise. Abstracted thought—thought without a
thinker—is metaphysics. A society's metaphysics is its ideol¬
ogy: theories that present themselves as the product of these
people or those. The Renaissance had no ideology.

Inasmuch as it has no metaphysics, a people is not threat¬
ened when its apparent society is threatened, or altered, or
even destroyed. The manipulation of the government, the
laws, the enforcement functions of a state either by persons
within the society (through usurpation or abuse of power)
or by persons without (in other states) cannot in itself affect
the decision of a people to be a people.

A people, as a people, has nothing to defend. In the same
way a people has nothing and no one to attack. One cannot
be free by opposing another. My freedom does not depend
on your loss of freedom. On the contrary, since freedom is
never freedom from society, but freedom for it, my freedom
inherently affirms yours.

A people has no enemies.

For a bounded, metaphysically veiled, and destined society,
enemies are necessary, conflict inevitable, and war likely.

War is not an act of unchecked ruthlessness but a declared
contest between bounded societies, or states. If a state has
no enemies it has no boundaries. To keep its definitions clear

a state must stimulate danger to itself. Under the constant
danger of war the people of a state are far more attentive
and obedient to the finite structures of their society: "just
as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness
which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so also corrup¬
tion in nations would be the product of prolonged, let alone
'perpetual' peace" (Hegel).

War presents itself as necessary for self-protection, when
in fact it is necessary for self-identification.

If it is the impulse of a finite player to go against another
nation in war, it is the design of an infinite player to oppose
war within a nation.

If as a people infinite players cannot go to war against a
people, they can act against war itself within whatever state
they happen to reside. In one way their opposition to war
resembles that of finite players: Each is opposed to the exis¬
tence of a state. But their reasons and the strategies for at¬
tempting to eliminate states are radically different. Finite
players go to war against states because they endanger bound¬
aries; infinite players oppose states because they engender
boundaries.

The strategy of finite players is to kill a state by killing
the people who invented it. Infinite players, however, under¬
standing war to be a conflict between states, conclude that
states can have only states as enemies; they cannot have per¬
sons as enemies. "Sometimes it is possible to kill a state without
killing a single one of its members; and war gives no right
which is not necessary to the gaining of its object" (Rousseau).
For infinite players, if it is possible to wage a war without
killing a single person, then it is possible to wage war only
without killing a single person.

For infinite players the chief difficulty with finite players'
commitment to war is not, however, that persons are killed.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 61

Indeed, finite players themselves often genuinely regret this
and do as little killing as possible. The difficulty is that such
warfare has in it the contradiction of all finite play. Winning
a war can be as destructive as losing one, for if boundaries
lose their clarity, as they do in a decisive victory, the state
loses its identity. Just as Alexander wept upon learning he
had no more enemies to conquer, finite players come to rue
their victories unless they see them quickly challenged by new
danger. A war fought to end all wars, in the strategy of finite
play, only breeds universal warfare.

The strategy of infinite players is horizonal. They do not
go to meet putative enemies with power and violence, but
with poiesis and vision. They invite them to become a people
in passage. Infinite players do not rise to meet arms with
arms; instead, they make use of laughter, vision, and surprise
to engage the state and put its boundaries back into play.

What will undo any boundary is the awareness that it is
our vision, and not what we are viewing, that is limited.

Plato suggested that some of the poets be driven out of
the Republic because they had the power to weaken the guard-
ians. Poets can make it impossible to have a war—unless they
tell stories that agree with the “general line” established by
the state. Poets who have no metaphysics, and therefore no
political line, make war impossible because they have the irre¬
sistible ability to show the guardians that what seems necessary
is only possible.

Hie danger of the poets, for Plato, is that they can imitate
so well that it is difficult to see what is true and what is

merely invented. Since reality cannot be invented, but only
discovered through the exercise of reason—according to
Plato—all poets must be put into the service of reason. The
poets are to surround the citizens of the Republic with such
art as will “lead them unawares from childhood to love of,
resemblance to, and harmony with, the beauty of reason.”

The use of the word “unawares” shows Plato's intention
to keep the metaphysical veil intact. Those who are being
led to reason cannot be aware of it. They must be led to it
without choosing it. Plato asks his poets not to create, but
to deceive.

True poets lead no one unawares. It is nothing other than
awareness that poets—that is, creators of all sorts—seek. They
do not display their art so as to make it appear real; they
display the real in a way that reveals it to be art.

We must remind ourselves, to be sure, that Plato was him¬
self an artist, a poietes. His Republic was an invention. So
were the theory of forms and the idea of the Good. Since
all veiling is self-veiling, we cannot help but think that behind
the rational metaphysician, philosophy's great Master Player,
stood Plato the poet, fully aware that the entire opus was
an act of play, an invitation to readers not to reproduce the
truth but to take his inventions into their own play, establish¬
ing the continuity of his art by changing it.

We can find metaphysicians thinking, but we cannot find
metaphysicians in their thinking. When we separate the meta¬
physics from the thinker we have an abstraction, the deathless
shadow of a once living act. It is no longer what someone

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 63

is saying but what someone has said. When metaphysics is
most successful on its own terms, it leaves its listeners in
silence, certainly not in laughter.

Metaphysics is about the real but is abstract. Poetry is the
making (poiesis) of the real and is concrete. Whenever what
is made (poiema) is separated from the maker (poietes), it
becomes metaphysical. As it stands there, and as the voice
of the poietes is no longer listened to, the poiema is an object
to be studied, not an act to be learned. One cannot learn
an object, but only the poiesis, or the act of creating objects.
To separate the poiema from poiesis, the created object from
the creative act, is the essence of the theatrical.

Poets cannot kill; they die. Metaphysics cannot die; it kills.

THREE

l Am the Genius
of Myself

I am the genius of myself, the poietes who composes the
sentences I speak and the actions I take. It is I, not the
mind, that thinks. It is I, not the will, that acts. It is I, not
the nervous system, that feels.

When I speak as the genius I am, I speak these words
for the first time. To repeat words is to speak them as though
another were saying them, in which case I am not saying
them. To be the genius of my speech is to be the origin of
my words, to say them for the first, and last, time. Even to
repeat my own words is to say them as though I were another
person in another time and place.

When I forsake my genius and speak to you as though I
were another, I also speak to you as someone you are not
and somewhere you are not. I address you as audience, and
do not expect you to respond as the genius you are.

Hamlet was not reading when he said he was reading words;
neither do we act when we perform actions, nor think when
we entertain thoughts. A dog taught the action of shaking
hands does not shake your hand. A robot can say words but
cannot say them to you.

Since being your own genius is dramatic, it has all the
paradox of infinite play: You can have what you have only

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 67

by releasing it to others. The sounds of the words you speak
may lie on your own lips, but if you do not relinquish them
entirely to a listener they never become words, and you say
nothing at all. The words die with the sound. Spoken to me,
your words become mine to do with as I please. As the genius
of your words, you lose all authority over them. So too with
thoughts. However you consider them your own, you cannot
think the thoughts themselves, but only what they are about.
You cannot think thoughts any more than you can act actions.
If you do not truly speak the words that reside entirely in
their own sound, neither can you think that which remains
thought or can be translated back into thought. In thinking
you cast thoughts beyond themselves, surrendering them to
that which they cannot be.

The paradox of genius exposes us directly to the dynamic
of open reciprocity, for if you are the genius of what you
say to me, I am the genius of what I hear you say. What
you say originally I can hear only originally. As you surrender
the sound on your lips, I surrender the sound in my ear.
Each of us has relinquished to the other what has been relin¬
quished to the other.

This does not mean that speech has come to nothing. On
the contrary, it has become speech that invites speech. When
the genius of speech is abandoned, words are said not originally
but repetitively. To repeat words, even our own, is to contain
them in their own sound. Veiled speech is that spoken as
though we have forgotten we are its originators.

To speak, or act, or think originally is to erase the boundary
of the self. It is to leave behind the territorial personality.
A genius does not have a mind full of thoughts but is the
thinker of thoughts, and is the center of a field of vision. It
is a field of vision, however, that is recognized as a field of

vision only when we see that it includes within itself the
original centers of other fields of vision.

This does not mean that I can see what you see. On the
contrary, it is because I cannot see what you see that I can
see at all. The discovery that you are the unrepeatable center
of your own vision is simultaneous with the discovery that I
am the center of my own.

As the geniuses we are, we do not look but see.

To look at something is to look at it within its limitations.
I look at what is marked off, at what stands apart from other
things. But things do not have their own limitations. Nothing
limits itself. The sea gulls circling on the invisible currents,
the cat on my desk, the siren of a distant ambulance are
not somehow distinct from the environment; they are the
environment. To look at them I must look for what I take
them to be. I was not looking at the sea gulls as though it
was the sea gulls who happened to be there—I was looking
for something to make this example. I might have seen them
as a sign that land is not far, or that the sea is not far; I
could have been looking for a form to reproduce on a canvas
or in a poem. To look at is to look for. It is to bring the
limitations with us. “Nature has no outline. Imagination has”
(Blake).

If to look is to look at what is contained within its limita¬
tions, to see is to see the limitations themselves. Each new
school of painting is new not because it now contains subject
matter ignored in earlier work, but because it sees the limita¬
tions previous artists imposed on their subject matter but could

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 69

not see themselves. The earlier artists worked within the out¬
lines they imagined; the later reworked their imaginations.

To look is a territorial activity. It is to observe one thing
after another within a bounded space—as though in time it
can all be seen. Academic fields are such territories. Sometimes
everything in a field finally does get looked at and defined—
that is, placed in its proper location. Mechanics and rhetoric
are such fields. Physics may prove to be. Biological mysteries
fall away at an astonishing rate. It becomes increasingly diffi¬
cult to find something new to look at.

When we pass from looking to seeing, we do not therefore
lose our sight of the objects observed. Seeing, in fact, does
not disturb our looking at all. It rather places us in that territory
as its genius, aware that our imagination does not create within
its outlines but creates the outlines themselves. The physicist
who sees speaks physics with us, inviting us to see that the
things we thought were there are not things at all. By learning
new limitations from such a person, we learn not only what
to look for with them but also how to see the way we use
limitations. A physics so taught becomes poiesis.

To be the genius of myself is not to bring myself into
being. As the origin of myself I am not also the cause of
myself, as though I were the product of my own action. But
then neither am I the product of any other action. My parents
may have wanted a child, but they could not have wanted
me.

I am both the outcome of my past and the transformation
of my past. To be related to the past as its outcome is to
stand in causal continuity with it. Such a relation can be

accounted for in scientific explanation. I can be said to be
the result of precise genetic influence. The date and place
of my birth are matters of causal necessity; I had no part in
deciding either. Neither could anyone else have chosen them.
My birth, when understood in terms of causal continuity,
marks no absolute beginning. It marks nothing at all except
an arbitrary point in an unbroken process. Causally speaking,
there is nothing new here, only the kinds of change that
conform to the known laws of nature.

Speaking in purely causal terms, I cannot say I was born;
I should say rather that I have emerged as a phase in the
process of reproduction. A reproduction is a repetition, a recur¬
rence of that which has been. Birth, on the other hand, in
causal terms, is all discontinuity. It has its beginning in itself,
and can be caused by nothing. It makes no sense to say, "I
was reproduced on this date and in this place.” To say "I
was born” is to speak of myself as having an uncaused point
of departure within the realm of the continuous, an absolute
beginning not comprehensible to the explanatory intelligence.

As such a phenomenon birth repeats nothing; it is not the
outcome of the past but the recasting of a drama already
under way. A birth is an event in the ongoing history of a
family, even the history of a culture. The radical originality
of a birth announces itself in the way it brings the dramatic
into conflict with the theatrical in cultural or family history.

Theatrically, my birth is an event of plotted repetition. I
am born as another member of my family and my culture.
Who I am is a question already answered by the content
and character of a tradition. Dramatically, my birth is the
rupture of that repetitive sequence, an event certain to change
what the past has meant. In this case the character of a tradi¬
tion is determined by who 1 am. Dramatically speaking, every
birth is the birth of genius.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 71

The drama under way at the time of my birth is moved
forward to new possibilities by the appearance of a new genius
within it. It is a drama, however, already peopled by finite
players attempting to forget, playing for keeps. If I am born
into, and add to, the culture of a family, I am also a product
and a citizen of its politics. I first experience the conflict
between the theatrical and the dramatic in the felt pressure
to take up one of the roles prepared for me: eldest son, favorite
daughter, heir to the family's honor, avenger of its losses.

Each of these roles comes, of course, with a script, one
whose lines a person might easily spend a lifetime repeating,
while intentionally forgetting, or repressing, the fact that it
is but a learned script. Such a person "is obliged to repeat
the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead
of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as
something belonging to the past" (Freud). It is the genius
in us who knows that the past is most definitely past, and
therefore not forever sealed but forever open to creative rein¬
terpretation.

Not allowing the past to be past may be the primary source
for the seriousness of finite players. Inasmuch as finite play
always has its audience, it is the audience to whom the finite
player intends to be known as winner. The finite player, in
other words, must not only have an audience but must have
an audience to convince.

Just as the titles of winners are worthless unless they are
visible to others, there is a kind of antititle that attaches to
invisibility. To the degree that we are invisible we have a
past that has condemned us to oblivion. It is as though we

have somehow been overlooked, even forgotten, by our chosen
audience. If it is the winners who are presently visible, it is
the losers who are invisibly past.

As we enter into finite play—not playfully, but seriously—
we come before an audience conscious that we bear the antiti¬
tles of invisibility. We feel the need, therefore, to prove to
them that we are not what we think they think we are or,
more precisely, that we were not who we think the audience
thinks we were.

As with all finite play, an acute contradiction quickly devel¬
ops at the heart of this attempt. As finite players we will
not enter the game with sufficient desire to win unless we
are ourselves convinced by the very audience we intend to
convince. That is, unless we believe we actually are the losers
the audience sees us to be, we will not have the necessary
desire to win . The more negatively we assess ourselves, the
more we strive to reverse the negative judgment of others.
The outcome brings the contradiction to perfection: by prov¬
ing to the audience they were wrong, we prove to ourselves
the audience was right.

The more we are recognized as winners, the more we know
ourselves to be losers. That is why it is rare for the winners
of highly coveted and publicized prizes to settle for their titles
and retire. Winners, especially celebrated winners, must prove
repeatedly they are winners. The script must be played over
and over again. Titles must be defended by new contests.
No one is ever wealthy enough, honored enough, applauded
enough. On the contrary, the visibility of our victories only
tightens the grip of the failures in our invisible past.

So crucial is this power of the past to finite play that we
must find ways of remembering that we have been forgotten
to sustain our interest in the struggle. There is a humiliating
memory at the bottom of all serious conflicts. “Remember

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 73

the Alamo!” “Remember the Maine!” “Remember Pearl Har¬
bor!” These are the cries that carried Americans into several
wars. Having once been insulted by Athens, the great Persian
Emperor Darius renewed his appetite for war by having a
page follow him about to whisper in his ear, “Sire, remember
the Athenians.”

Indeed, it is only by remembering what we have forgotten
that we can enter into competition with sufficient intensity
to be able to forget we have forgotten the character of all
play: Whoever must play cannot play.

Whenever we act as the genius of ourselves, it will be in
the spirit of allowing the past to be past. It is the genius in
us who is capable of ridding us of resentment by exercising
what Nietzsche called the “faculty of oblivion,” not as a way
of denying the past but as a way of reshaping it through
our own originality. Then we forget that we have been forgot¬
ten by an audience, and remember that we have forgotten
our freedom to play.

If in the culture into which we are born there are always
persons who will urge us to theatricalize our lives by supplying
us with a repeatable past, there will also be persons (possibly
the same ones) in whose presence we learn to prepare ourselves
for surprise. It is in the presence of such persons that we
first recognize ourselves as the geniuses we are.

These persons do not give us our genius or produce it in
us. In no way is the source of genius external to itself; never
is a child moved to genius. Genius arises with touch. Touch

is a characteristically paradoxical phenomenon of infinite play.

I am not touched by an other when the distance between
us is reduced to zero. I am touched only if I respond from
my own center—that is, spontaneously, originally. But you
do not touch me except from your own center, out of your
own genius. Touching is always reciprocal. You cannot touch
me unless I touch you in response.

The opposite of touching is moving . You move me by press¬
ing me from without toward a place you have already foreseen
and perhaps prepared. It is a staged action that succeeds only
if in moving me you remain unmoved yourself. I can be moved
to tears by skilled performances and heart-rending newspaper
accounts, or moved to passion by political manifestos and
narratives of heroic achievement—but in each case I am
moved according to a formula or design to which the actor
or agent is immune. When actors bring themselves to tears
by their performance, and not as their performance, they
have failed their craft; they have become theatrically inept.

This means that we can be moved only by persons who
are not what they are; we can be moved only when we are
not who we are, but are what we cannot be.

When I am touched, I am touched only as the person I
am behind all the theatrical masks, but at the same time I
am changed from within—and whoever touches me is touched
as well. We do not touch by design. Indeed, all designs are
shattered by touching. Whoever touches and whoever is
touched cannot but be surprised. (The unpredictability of this
phenomenon is reflected in our reference to the insane as
"touched/’)

We can be moved only by way of our veils. We are touched
through our veils.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 75

The character of touching can be seen quite clearly in the
way infinite players understand both healing and sexuality.

If to be touched is to respond from one’s center, it is also
to respond as a whole person. To be whole is to be hale, or
healthy. In sum, whoever is touched is healed.

The finite player’s interest is not in being healed, or made
whole, but in being cured, or made functional. Healing restores
me to play, curing restores me to competition in one or another
game.

Physicians who cure must abstract persons into functions.
They Treat the illness, not the person. And persons willfully
present themselves as functions. Indeed, what sustains the
enormous size and cost of the curing professions is the wide¬
spread desire to see oneself as a function, or a collection of
functions. To be ill is to be dysfunctional; to be dysfunctional
is to be unable to compete in one’s preferred contests. It is
a kind of death, an inability to acquire titles. The ill become
invisible. Illness always has the smell of death about it: Either
it may lead to death, or it leads to the death of a person as
competitor. The dread of illness is the dread of losing.

One is never ill in general. One is always ill with relation
to some bounded activity. It is not cancer that makes me
ill. It is because I cannot work, or run, or swallow that I
am ill with cancer. The loss of function, the obstruction of
an activity, cannot in itself destroy my health. I am too heavy
to fly by flapping my arms, but I do not for that reason com¬
plain of being sick with weight. However, if I desired to be
a fashion model, a dancer, or a jockey, I would consider exces¬
sive weight to be a kind of disease and would be likely to
consult a doctor, a nutritionist, or another specialist to be
cured of it.

When I am healed I am restored to my center in ^ way
that my freedom as a person is not compromised by my loss
of functions. This means that the illness need not be elimi¬
nated before I can be healed. I am not free to the degree
that I can overcome my infirmities, but only to the degree
that I can put my infirmities into play. I am cured of my
illness; I am healed with my illness.

Healing, of course, has all the reciprocity of touching. Just
as I cannot touch myself, I cannot heal myself. But healing
requires no specialists, only those who can come to us out
of their own center, and who are prepared to be healed them¬
selves.

Sexuality for the infinite player is entirely a matter of touch.
One cannot touch without touching sexually.

Because sexuality is a drama of origins, it gives full expression
to the genius you are and to the genius of others who partici¬
pate in that drama. This throws a high challenge before the
political ideologue. Aware that genuine sexual expression is
at least as dangerous to society as genuine artistic expression,
the sexual metaphysician can appeal to at least two powerful
solutions. One is to treat sexuality as a process of reproduction;
another is to place it in the area of feeling and behavior.

Although reproduction is a process that operates by way
of our bodies, it nonetheless operates autonomously. Like every
other natural process it is a phenomenon of causal continuity,
having no inherent beginning or end. Therefore we cannot
be said to initiate the process by any act of our own. We
can only be carried along by it, inasmuch as conception occurs
only when all the necessary conditions have been met by the

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 77

parenting couple. No one conceives a child; a child is conceived
in the conjunction of sperm and ovum. The mother does
not give birth to a child; the mother is where the birth occurs.

The metaphysics of sexuality, applying to this solution, can
therefore draw a boundary line around sexual activity that
leaves the genius of parenting altogether outside it. Thus the
familiar view of some Christian theologians who say that the
only end of the sexual act is procreation. But this metaphysics,
committed as it is to the continuity of the process, also leaves
the genius of the child entirely outside it. Thus the familiar
view of theologians who say that the end of childbirth is to
provide citizens for the kingdom of God. Metaphysically un¬
derstood, sexuality has nothing to do with our existence as
persons, for it views persons as expressions of sexuality, and
not sexuality as the expression of persons.

The second way of veiling genuine sexuality is to regard
it as a feeling or as a kind of behavior. In either case it has
the character of something under observation. Even if it is
our own sexuality we are concerned with, we can still look
on it from without, making an assessment of it as though it
were of another person. We ask ourselves and each other
whether certain behavior is acceptable or desirable; we are
puzzled over the proper response to sexual feelings—ours or
another’s. Sexuality can in this way be dealt with as a societal
phenomenon, regulated and managed according to the prevail¬
ing ideology. Sexual rebels, violators of the sexual taboos, do
not weaken this ideology but affirm it as the rules of finite
play.

It is convenient to think that sexual misfits violate rules.
The matter is subtler by far. They are not concerned to oppose
the rules themselves but to engage in competitive struggle
by way of those rules. Sexual attractiveness, or sexiness, is
effective only to the degree that someone is offended by it.

Pornography is exciting only so far as it reveals something
forbidden, something otherwise unseeable. Thus the manda¬
tory hostility in it, the quality of shock and violence.

Because sexuality is so rich in the mystery of origin, it
becomes a region of human action deeply shaped by resent¬
ment, where participants play out a manifold strategy of hostile
encounters. The players in finite sexuality not only require
the offended resistance of those who refuse to join them in
their play, they require the resistance of those who do join
them.

Sexual plotting on the part of one player is in fact stimulated
by disinterest or fear or loathing on the part of the other.
A Master Player of finite sexuality chooses not to take these
attitudes as a way of refusing the sexual game, but takes them
to be part of the game. Thus my indifference or revulsion
to your sexuality becomes in your masterful play a sexual indif¬
ference, a sexual revulsion. Suddenly I am no longer indifferent
to your game, but indifferent to you within your game, and
have ipso facto made myself your opponent. This is the plot
of the classical pulp novel and of Hollywood romance: indiffer¬
ent girl won by ardent boy.

The profound seriousness of such sexual play is seen in
the unique nature of the prize that goes to the winner. What
one wants in the sexual contest is not just to have defeated
the other, but to have the defeated other. Sexuality is the
only finite game in which the winner's prize is the defeated
opponent .

Sexual titles, like all other titles, have appropriately conspicu¬
ous emblems. However, only in sexuality do persons themselves
become property. In slavery or wage labor what we possess
is not the persons of the slaves or the workers, but the products
of their labors. In this case, to use Marx's phrase, persons
are abstracted from their labor. But in sexuality persons are

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 79

abstracted from themselves. The seduced opponent is so dis¬
played as to draw public attention to the seducer's triumph.
In the complex plotting of sexual encounter it is by no means
uncommon for the partners to have played a double game
in which each is winner and loser, and each is an emblem
for the other's seductive power.

A society shows its mastery in the management of sexuality
not when it sets out unambiguous standards for sexual behavior
or prescribed attitudes toward sexual feelings, but when it
institutionalizes the emblematic display of sexual conquest.
These institutions can be as varied as burning widows alive
on the funeral pyres of their husbands or requiring the high
visibility of a spouse at an elected official's inauguration.

Finite sexuality is a form of theater in which the distance
between persons is regularly reduced to zero but in which
neither touches the other.

Insofar as sexuality is a drama of origin it is original to
society and not derivative of it. It is therefore somewhat mis¬
leading to describe society as a regulator of finite sexual play.
It is more the case that finite sexuality shapes society than
is shaped by it. Only to a limited extent do we take on the
sexual roles assigned us by society. Much more frequently
we enter into societal arrangements by way of sexual roles.
(For example, we are more likely to refer to the king as the
father of the country than we are to refer to the father as
king of the family.) While society does serve a regulatory
function, it is probably more correctly understood as sexuality
making use of society to regulate itself.

This means that society plays little or no role in either

causing or preventing sexual tensions. On the contrary, society
absorbs sexual tensions into all of its structures. It becomes
the larger theater for playing out the patterns of resentment
learned in the family. Society is where we prove to parents
qua audience that we are not what we thought they thought
we were. Since the emphasis in this relationship is not on
what our parents thought of us but on what we thought they
thought, they become an audience that easily survives their
physical absence or death. Moreover, for the same reason
they become an audience whose definitive approval we can
never win.

To use Freud's famous phrase, the civilized are, therefore,
the discontent. We do not become losers in civilization but
become civilized as losers. The collective result of this ineradi¬
cable sense of failure is that civilizations take on the spirit
of resentment. Acutely sensitive to an imagined audience,
they are easily offended by other civilizations. Indeed, even
the most powerful societies can be embarrassed by the weak¬
est: the Soviet Union by Afghanistan, Great Britain by Argen¬
tina, the United States by Grenada.

This is also why the only true revolutionary act is not the
overthrow of the father by the son—which only reinforces
the existing patterns of resentment—but the restoration of
genius to sexuality. It is by no means an accident that the
only successful attempt of the American citizenry to force
the ending of a foreign war occurred simultaneously with a
wide revision in sexual attitudes. The civilization quickly recov¬
ered from this threat, however, by tempting these revolutionar¬
ies into a new sexual politics, one of societal standoff, where
sexual genius is confused with such struggles as the passage
of the Equal Rights Amendment and the election of women
to national office.

There is one other way in which society is shaped by the

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 81

tensions of finite sexuality: in its orientation toward property.
Since sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner's
prize is the loser, the most desirable form of property is the
publicly acknowledged possession of another's person, a rela¬
tionship to which the possessed must of course freely consent.
All other forms of property are considerably less desirable,
even when they are vast in quantity. The true value of my
property, in fact, varies not with its monetary worth but with
its effectiveness in winning for me the declaration that I am
the Master Player in our game with each other.

The most serious struggles are those for sexual property.
For this wars are fought, lives are generously risked, great
schemes are initiated. However, who wins empire, fortune,
and fame but loses in love has lost in everything.

Because finite, or veiled, sexuality is one or another struggle
which its participants mean to win, it is oriented toward mo¬
ments, outcomes, final scenes. Like all finite play it proceeds
largely by deception. Sexual desires are usually not directly
announced but concealed under a series of feints, gestures,
styles of dress, and showy behavior. Seductions are staged,
scripted, costumed. Certain responses are sought, plots are
developed. In skillful seductions delays are employed, special
circumstances and settings are arranged.

Seductions are designed to come to an end. Time runs
out. The play is finished. All that remains is recollection, the
memory of a moment, and perhaps a longing for its repetition.
Seductions cannot be repeated. Once one has won or lost
in a particular finite game, the game cannot be played over.

Moments once reached cannot be reached again. Lovers often
sustain vivid reminders of extraordinary moments, but they
are reminded at the same time of their impotence in recreating
them. The appetite for novelty in lovemaking—new positions,
the use of drugs, exotic surroundings, additional partners—
is only a search for new moments that can live on only in
recollection.

As with all finite play, the goal of veiled sexuality is to
bring itself to an end.

By contrast, infinite players have no interest in seduction
or in restricting the freedom of another to one's own bound¬
aries of play. Infinite players recognize choice in all aspects
of sexuality. They may see in themselves and in others, for
example, the infant's desire to compete for the mother, but
they also see that there is neither physiological nor societal
destiny in sexual patterns. Who chooses to compete with an¬
other can also choose to play with another.

Sexuality is not a bounded phenomenon but a horizonal
phenomenon for infinite players. One can never say, therefore,
that an infinite player is homosexual, or heterosexual, or celi¬
bate, or adulterous, or faithful—because each of these defini¬
tions has to do with boundaries, with circumscribed areas
and styles of play. Infinite players do not play within sexual
boundaries, but with sexual boundaries. They are concerned
not with power but with vision.

In their sexual play they suffer others, allow them to be
as they are. Suffering others, they open themselves. Open,
they learn both about others and about themselves. Learning,

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 83

they grow. What they learn is not about sexuality, but how
to be more concretely and originally themselves, to be the
genius of their own actions, to be whole.

Moving therefore from an original center, the sexual engage¬
ments of infinite players have no standards, no ideals, no marks
of success or failure. Neither orgasm nor conception is a goal
in their play, although either may be part of the play.

There is nothing hidden in infinite sexuality. Sexual desire
is exposed as sexual desire and is never therefore serious. Its
satisfaction is never an achievement, but an act in a continuing
relationship, and therefore joyous. Its lack of satisfaction is
never a failure, but only a matter to be taken on into further
play.

Infinite lovers may or may not have a family. Rousseau
said the only human institution that is not conventional is
the family, which for a brief time is required by nature. Rous¬
seau erred. No family is united by natural or any other kind
of necessity. Families can convene only out of choice. The
family of infinite lovers has this difference, that it is self-evi¬
dently chosen. It is a progressive work of unveiling. Fathering
and mothering are roles freely assumed but always with the
design of showing them to be theatrical. It is the intention
of parents in such families to make it plain to their children
that they all play cultural and not societal roles, that they
are only roles, and that they are all truly concrete persons
behind them. Therefore, children also learn that they have
a family only by choosing to have it, by a collective act to
be a family with each other.

Infinite sexuality does not focus its attention on certain
parts or regions of the body. Infinite lovers have no "private
parts/' They do not regard their bodies as having secret zones
that can be exposed or made accessible to others for special
favors. It is not their bodies but their persons they make
accessible to others.

The paradox of infinite sexuality is that by regarding sexual¬
ity as an expression of the person and not the body, it becomes
fully embodied play. It becomes a drama of touching.

The triumph of finite sexuality is to be liberated from play
into the body. The essence of infinite sexuality is to be liberated
into play with the body. In finite sexuality I expect to relate
to you as a body; in infinite sexuality I expect to relate to
you in your body.

Infinite lovers conform to the sexual expectations of others
in a way that does not expose something hidden, but unveils
something in plain sight: that sexual engagement is a poiesis
of free persons. In this exposure they emerge as the persons
they are. They meet others with their limitations, and not
within their limitations. In doing so they expect to be trans¬
formed—and are transformed.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 85

FOUR

A Finite Game
Occurs Within
aWorld

A finite game occurs within a world. The fact that it must
be limited temporally, numerically, and spatially means that
there is something against which the limits stand. There is
an outside to every finite game. Its limits are meaningless
unless there is something to be limited, unless there is a larger
space, a longer time, a greater number of possible competitors.

There is nothing about a finite game, in itself, that deter¬
mines at what time it is to be played, or by whom , or where.

The rules of a finite game will indicate the temporal, spatial,
and numerical nature of the game itself; that, for example,
it will last sixty minutes, will be played on a field 100 yards
in length, and by two teams of eleven players each. But the
rules do not, and cannot, determine the date, the location,
and the specific participants. There is nothing in the rules
that requires professional teams composed of certain persons,
earning salaries of specified amounts, joining at the end of
each season in a national championship. The rules for the
practice of medicine or for the exercise of the office of the
Bishop of Rome do not indicate which persons are to enter
these games; which kinds of persons, yes, but never the names
of anyone .

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 89

A world provides an absolute reference without which the
time, place, and participants make no sense.

Whatever occurs within a game is relatively intelligible with
reference to whatever else has happened inside its boundaries,
but it is absolutely intelligible with reference to that world
for the sake of which its boundaries exist.

It is relatively intelligible to have won an election for the
presidency by a few thousand votes after a campaign of about
ten months; it is absolutely intelligible to be the sixteenth
President of the United States, a society unambiguously
marked off from all the rest of the world by its declared bound¬
aries, in the 1,860th year of that world's history.

We cannot have a precise understanding of what it means
to be the winner of a contest until we can place the game
in the absolute dimensions of a world.

World exists in the form of audience. A world is not all that
is the case, but that which determines all that is the case.

An audience consists of persons observing a contest without
participating in it.

No one determines who an audience will be. No exercise
of power can make a world. A world must be its own spontane¬
ous source. “A world worlds" (Heidegger). Who must be a
world cannot be a world.

The number of persons who join an audience is irrelevant.
So is the time and space in which an audience occurs. The
temporal and spatial boundaries of a finite game must be
absolute—in relation to an audience or a world. But when
and where a world occurs, and whom it includes, is of no
importance. One does not say, "1 was in the world, or audience,

on November 22, 1963/' but rather, "I was just getting out
of the car thinking about what to cook for dinner when I
heard that the President had been shot/' An audience does
not receive its identity according to the persons within it,
but according to the events it observes. Those who remember
that day remember precisely what they were doing in the
early afternoon of that day, not because it was the 22d of
November, but because it was at that moment that they be¬
came audience to the events of that day.

If the boundaries of an audience are irrelevant, what is
relevant is the unity of the audience. They must be a singular
entity, bound in their desire to see who will win the contest
before them. Anyone for whom this desire is not primary is
not in the audience for that contest, and is not a person in
that world.

The fact that a finite game needs an audience before which
it can be played, and the fact that an audience needs to be
singularly absorbed in the events before it, show the crucial
reciprocity of finite play and the world. Finite players need
the world to provide an absolute reference for understanding
themselves; simultaneously, the world needs the theater of
finite play to remain a world. George Eliot's villainous charac¬
ter, Grandcourt, "did not care a languid curse for anyone's
admiration; but this state of non-caring, just as much as desire,
required its related object—namely, a world of admiring and
envying spectators: for if you are fond of looking stonily at
smiling persons, the persons must be there and they must
smile."

We are players in search of a world as often as we are
world in search of players, and sometimes we are both at
once. Some worlds pass quickly into existence, and quickly
out of it. Some sustain themselves for longer periods, but
no world lasts forever.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 91

There is an indefinite number of worlds.

The reciprocity of game and world has another, deeper
effect on the persons involved. Because the seriousness of
finite play derives from the players' need to correct another’s
putative assessment of themselves, there is no requirement
that the audience be physically present, since players are al¬
ready their own audience. Just as in finite sexuality where
the absence or death of parents has no effect on the child’s
determination to prove them wrong, finite players become
their own hostile observers in the very act of competing.

I cannot be a finite player without being divided against
myself.

A similar dynamic is found in the audience. When suffi¬
ciently oblivious to their status as audience, the observers of
a finite game become so absorbed in its conduct that they
lose the sense of distance between themselves and the players.
It is they, quite as much as the players, who win or lose.
For this reason the audience absorbs in itself the same politics
of resentment that moves players to show they are not what
they think others think they are. The audience is under the
same constraint to disprove this judgment.

When we ask where an audience will find its own audience,
we discover the division inherent in all audiences. Each side
of a conflict comes with its own partisan observers. Inasmuch
as the conflict is expressed within the bounded playing of a

game, the audience is unified—but its unity consists in its
opposition to itself.

We cannot become a world without being divided against
ourselves.

Occurring before a world, theatrically, a finite game occurs
within time. Because it has its boundaries, its beginning and
end, within the absolute temporal limits established by a world,
time for a finite player runs out; it is used up. It is a diminishing
quantity.

A finite game does not have its own time. It exists in a
world's time. An audience allows players only so much time
to win their titles.

Early in a game time seems abundant, and there appears
a greater freedom to develop future strategies. Late in a game,
time is rapidly being consumed. As choices become more lim¬
ited they become more important. Errors are more disastrous.

We look on childhood and youth as those "times of life"
rich with possibility only because there still seem to remain
so many paths open to a successful outcome. Each year that
passes, however, increases the competitive value of making
strategically correct decisions. The errors of childhood can
be more easily amended than those of adulthood.

For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time.
We must have time to be free.

The passage of time is always relative to that which does
not pass, to the timeless. Victories occur in time, but the
titles won in them are timeless. Titles neither age nor die.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 93

The points of reference for all finite history are signal triumphs
meant never to be forgotten: establishment of the throne of
David, the birth of the Savior, the journey to Medina, the
battle of Hastings, the American, French, Russian, Chinese,
and Cuban revolutions.

Time divided into periods is theatrical time. The lapse of
time between the opening and closing of an era is a scene
between curtains. It is not a time lived, but a time viewed—
by both players and audience. The periodization of time pre¬
supposes a viewer existing outside the boundaries of play, able
to see the beginning and the end simultaneously.

The outcome of a finite game is the past waiting to happen.
Whoever plays toward a certain outcome desires a particular
past. By competing for a future prize, finite players compete
for a prized past.

The infinite player in us does not consume time but gener¬
ates it. Because infinite play is dramatic and has no scripted
conclusion, its time is time lived and not time viewed.

As an infinite player one is neither young nor old, for one
does not live in the time of another. There is therefore no
external measure of an infinite players temporality. Time does
not pass for an infinite player. Each moment of time is a
beginning.

Each moment is not the beginning of a period of time.
It is the beginning of an event that gives the time within it
its specific quality. For an infinite player there is no such
thing as an hour of time. There can be an hour of love, or
a day of grieving, or a season of learning, or a period of labor.

An infinite player does not begin working for the purpose

of filling up a period of time with work, but for the purpose
of filling work with time. Work is not an infinite player's
way of passing time, but of engendering possibility. Work is
not a way of arriving at a desired present and securing it
against an unpredictable future, but of moving toward a future
which itself has a future.

Infinite players cannot say how much they have completed
in their work or love or quarreling, but only that much remains
incomplete in it. They are not concerned to determine when
it is over, but only what comes of it.

For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time.
We must have the time to be free. For the infinite player
in us time is a function of freedom. We are free to have
time. A finite player puts play into time. An infinite player
puts time into play.

Just as infinite players can play any number of finite games,
so too can they join the audience of any game. They do so,
however, for the play that is in observing, quite aware that
they are audience. They look, but they see that they are look¬
ing.

Infinite play remains invisible to the finite observer. Such
viewers are looking for closure, for the ways in which players
can bring matters to a conclusion and finish whatever remains
unfinished. They are looking for the way time has exhausted
itself, or will soon do so. Finite players stand before infinite
play as they stand before art, looking at it, making a poiema
of it.

If, however, the observers see the poiesis in the work they
cease at once being observers. They find themselves in its

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 95

time, aware that it remains unfinished, aware that their reading
of the poetry is itself poetry. Infected then by the genius of
the artist they recover their own genius, becoming beginners
with nothing but possibility ahead of them.

If the goal of finite play is to win titles for their timelessness,
and thus eternal life for oneself, the essence of infinite play
is the paradoxical engagement with temporality that Meister
Eckhart called "eternal birth.”

FIVE

NatureIsthe
Realm ofthe
Unspeakable

Nature is the realm of the unspeakable. It has no voice of
its own, and nothing to say. We experience the unspeakability
of nature as its utter indifference to human culture.

The Master Player in us tolerates this indifference scarcely
at all. Indeed, we respond to it as a challenge, an invitation
to confrontation and struggle. If nature will offer us no home,
offer us nothing at all, we will then clear and arrange a space
for ourselves. We take nature on as an opponent to be subdued
for the sake of civilization. We count among the highest
achievements of modern society the development of a technol¬
ogy that allows us to master nature's vagaries.

The effort has largely taken the form of theatricalizing our
relation to nature. Like any Master Player we have been pa¬
tiently attentive to the slightest clues in our opponent's behav¬
ior—as a way of preparing ourselves against surprise. Like
hunters stalking their prey, we have learned to mimic the
movements of nature, waiting for the chance to take hold
of them before they get away from us. “Nature, to be com¬
manded, must be obeyed" (Bacon). It is as though, by learning
its secret script, we have learned to direct its play as well.
There is little left to surprise us.

The assumption guiding our struggle against nature is that

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 99

deep within itself nature contains a structure, an order, that
is ultimately intelligible to the human understanding. Since
this inherent structure determines the way things change, and
is not itself subject to change, we speak of nature being lawful,
of repeating itself according to quite predictable patterns.

What we have done by showing that certain events repeat
themselves according to known laws is to explain them. Expla¬
nation is the mode of discourse in which we show why matters
must be as they are. All laws made use of in explanation
look backward in time from the conclusion or the completion
of a sequence. It is implicit in all explanatory discourse that
just as there is a discoverable necessity in the outcome of
past events, there is a discoverable necessity in future events.
What can be explained can also be predicted, if one knows
the initial events and the laws covering their succession. A
prediction is but an explanation in advance.

Because of its thorough lawfulness nature has no genius
of its own. On the contrary, it is sometimes thought that
the grandest discovery of the human genius is the perfect
compatibility between the structure of the natural order and
the structure of the mind, thereby making a complete under¬
standing of nature possible. "One may say 'the eternal mystery
of the world is its comprehensibility' ” (Einstein).

This is as much as to say that nature does have a voice,
and its voice is no different from our own. We can then
presume to speak for the unspeakable.

This achievement is often raised as a sign of the great
superiority of modern civilization over the many faded and
lost civilizations of the ancients. While our great skill lies in
finding patterns of repetition under the apparent play of acci¬
dent and chance, less successful civilizations dealt with the
threats of natural accident by appealing to supernatural powers

100

for protection. But the voices of the gods proved to be ignorant
and false; they have been silenced by the truth.

There is an irony in our silencing of the gods. By presuming
to speak for the unspeakable, by hearing our own voice as
the voice of nature, we have had to step outside the circle
of nature. It is one thing for physics and chemistry to be
speaking about nature; it is quite another for physics and
chemistry to be the speaking of nature. No chemist would
want to say that chemistry is itself chemical, for our speaking
cannot be both chemical and about chemistry. If speaking
about a process is itself part of the process, there is something
that must remain permanently hidden from the speaker. To
be intelligible at all, we must claim that we can step aside
from the process and comment on it “objectively” and “dispas¬
sionately,” without anything obstructing our view of these
matters. Here lies the irony: By way of this perfectly reasonable
claim the gods have stolen back into our struggle with nature.
By depriving the gods of their own voices, the gods have
taken ours. It is we who speak as supernatural intelligences
and powers, masters of the forces of nature.

This irony passes unnoticed only so long as we continue
to veil ourselves against what we can otherwise plainly see:
nature allows no master over itself. Bacon's principle works
both ways. If we must obey to command, then our command¬
ing is only obeying and not commanding at all. There is no
such thing as an unnatural act. Nothing can be done to or
against nature, much less outside it. Therefore, the ignorance
we thought we could avoid by an unclouded observation of

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 101

nature has swept us back into itself. What we thought we
read in nature we discover we have read into nature. "We
have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself
but nature exposed to our method of questioning” (Heisen¬
berg).

We are speaking now of no ordinary ignorance. It is not
what we could have known but do not; it is unintelligibility
itself: that which no mind can ever comprehend.

Unveiled, aware of the insuperable limitation placed against
all our looking, we come back to nature's perfect silence. Now
we can see that it is a silence so complete there is no way
of knowing what it is silent about—if anything. What we
learn from this silence is the unlikeness between nature and
whatever we could think or say about it. But this silence
has an irony of its own: Far from stupefying us, it provides
an indispensable condition to the mind's own originality. By
confronting us with radical unlikeness, nature becomes the
source of metaphor.

Metaphor is the joining of like to unlike such that one
can never become the other. Metaphor requires an irreducibil-
ity, an imperturbable indifference of its terms for one another.
The falcon can be the "kingdom of daylight's dauphin” only
if the daylight could have no dauphin, could indeed have
nothing to do with dauphins.

At its root all language has the character of metaphor, be¬
cause no matter what it intends to be about it remains lan¬
guage, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about.
This means that we can never have the falcon, only the word
"falcon.” To say that we have the falcon, and not the "falcon,”

102

is to presume again that we know precisely what it is we
have, that we can see it in its entirety, and that we can speak
as nature itself.

The unspeakability of nature is the very possibility of lan¬
guage.

Our attempt to take control of nature, to be Master Player
in our opposition to it, is an attempt to rid ourselves of lan¬
guage. It is the refusal to accept nature as "nature/' It is to
deafen ourselves to metaphor, and to make nature into some¬
thing so familiar it is essentially an extension of our willing
and speaking. What the hunter kills is not the deer, but the
metaphor of the deer—the "deer." Killing the deer is not
an act against nature; it is an act against language. To kill
is to impose a silence that remains a silence. It is the reduction
of an unpredictable vitality to a predictable mass, the transfor¬
mation of the remote into the familiar. It is to rid oneself
of the need to attend to its otherness.

The physicists who look at their objects within their limita¬
tions teach physics; those who see the limitations they place
around their objects teach "physics." For them physics is a
poiesis.

If nature is the realm of the unspeakable, history is the
realm of the speakable. Indeed, no speaking is possible that
is not itself historical. Students of history, like students of
nature, often believe they can find unbiased, direct views of
events. They look in on the lives of others, noting the multi¬
tude of ways those lives have been limited by the age in
which they were lived. But no one can look in on an age,
even if it is one's own age, without looking out of an age as

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 103

well. There is no refuge outside history for such viewers, any
more than there is a vantage outside nature.

Since history is the drama of genius, its relentless surprise
tempts us into designing boundaries for it, searching through
it for patterns of repetition. Historians sometimes speak of
trends, of cycles, of currents, of forces, as though they were
describing natural events. In doing so they must dehistoricize
themselves, taking a perspective from the timeless, believing
that each observed history is always of others and never of
themselves, that each observation is of history but not itself
historical.

Genuine historians therefore reverse the assumption of the
observers of nature that the observation itself cannot be an
act of nature. Historians who understand themselves to be
historical abandon explanation altogether. The mode of dis¬
course appropriate to such self-aware history is narrative .

Like explanation, narrative is concerned with a sequence
of events and brings its tale to a conclusion. However, there
is no general law that makes this outcome necessary. In a
genuine story there is no law that makes any act necessary.
Explanations place all apparent possibilities into the context
of the necessary; stories set all necessities into the context
of the possible.

Explanation can tolerate a degree of chance, but it cannot
comprehend freedom at all. We explain nothing when we
say that persons do whatever they do because they choose
to do it. On the other hand, causation cannot find a place
in narrative. We have not told a story when we show that
persons do whatever they do because they were caused to
do it—by their genes, their social circumstances, or the influ¬
ence of the gods.

Explanations settle issues, showing that matters must end
as they have. Narratives raise issues, showing that matters

104

do not end as they must but as they do. Explanation sets
the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to
rethink what we thought we knew.

If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, lan¬
guage is the possibility of history.

Successful explanations do not draw attention to themselves
as modes of speaking, because what is explained is not itself
subject to history. If I explain to you why cold water sinks
to the bottom of the pond and ice rises to the surface, I
certainly do not intend my explanation to be true now and
not later. The explanation is true anywhere and any time.

That I choose to explain this to you in this time and place,
however, is historical; it is an event—the narrative of our
relation with each other. There must therefore be a reason
for the speaking of this verity. Explanations are not offered
gratuitiously, just because, say, ice happens to float. I can
explain nothing to you unless I first draw your attention to
patent inadequacies in your knowledge: discontinuities in the
relations between objects, or the presence of anomalies you
cannot account for by any of the laws known to you. You
will remain deaf to my explanations until you suspect yourself
of falsehood.

Many of these suspicions are, of course, minor, requiring
merely small adjustments in one's views, incurring no doubt
whatsoever concerning those views. Major challenges, how¬
ever, are too serious to be met with argument, or with sharp¬
ened explanation. They call either for outright and wholesale
rejection, or for conversion. One does not cross over from
Manichaeism to Christianity, or from Lamarckianism to Dar-

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 105

winism, by a mere adjustment of views. True conversions con¬
sist in the choice of a new audience, that is, of a new world.
All that was once familiar is now seen in startlingly new ways.

As theatrical as conversions are, they remain oblivious to
the degree to which choice is involved in the passage from
one world to another. Radical conversions, especially, veil
themselves against their own arbitrariness. Augustine, the most
famous convert of antiquity, was puzzled that he could have
held so firmly to so many different falsehoods; he was not
astounded that there are so many different truths. His conver¬
sion was not from explanation to narrative, but from one
explanation to another. When he crossed the line from pagan¬
ism to Christianity, he arrived in the territory of a truth beyond
further challenge.

Explanations succeed only by convincing resistant hearers
of their error. If you will not hear my explanations until you
are suspicious of your own truths, you will not accept my
explanations until you are convinced of your error. Explanation
is an antagonistic encounter that succeeds by defeating an
opponent. It possesses the same dynamic of resentment found
in other finite play. I will press my explanations on you because
I need to show that I do not live in the error that I think
others think I do.

Whoever wins this struggle is privileged with the claim
to true knowledge. Knowledge has been arrived at, it is the
outcome of this engagement. Its winners have the uncontested
power to make certain statements of fact. They are to be
listened to. In those areas appropriate to the contests now
concluded, winners possess a knowledge that no longer can
be challenged.

Knowledge, therefore, is like property. It must be published,
declared, or in some other way so displayed that others cannot

106

but take account of it. It must stand in their way. It must
be emblematic, pointing backward at its possessor's competi¬
tive skill.

So close are knowledge and property that they are often
thought to be continuous. Those who are entitled to knowl¬
edge feel they should be granted property as well, and those
who are entitled to property believe a certain knowledge goes
with it. Scholars demand higher salaries for their publishable
successes; industrialists sit on university boards.

If explanation, to be successful, must be oblivious to the
silence of nature, it must also in its success impose silence
on its listeners. Imposed silence is the first consequence of
the Master Player's triumph.

What one wins in a title is the privilege of magisterial
speech. The privilege of magisterial speech is the highest honor
attaching to any title. We expect the first act of a winner
to be a speech. The first act of the loser may also be a speech,
but it will be a speech to concede victory, to declare there
will be no further challenge to the winner. It is a speech
that promises to silence the loser's voice.

The silence to which the losers pledge themselves is the
silence of obedience. Losers have nothing to say; nor have
they an audience who would listen. The vanquished are effec¬
tively of one will with the victors, and of one mind; they
are completely incapable of opposition, and therefore without
any otherness whatsoever.

The victorious do not speak with the defeated; they speak
for the defeated. Husbands speak for wives in the finite family,

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 107

and parents for their children. Kings speak for the realm,
governors for the state, popes for the church. Indeed, the
titled, as titled, cannot speak with anyone.

It is chiefly in magisterial speech that the power of winners
resides. To be powerful is to have one's words obeyed. It is
only by magisterial speech that the emblematic property of
winners can be safeguarded. Those entitled to their possessions
have the privilege of calling the police, calling up an army,
to force the recognition of their emblems.

The power of gods is known principally through their utter¬
ances. The sicut dixit dominus (thus says the lord) is always
a signal for ritual silence. The speech of a god can be so
perfectly expressive of that god's power that the god and its
speech become identical: "In the beginning was the word.
The word was with God, and the word was God."

One is speechless before a god, or silent before a winner,
because it no longer matters to others what one has to say.
To lose a contest is to become obedient; to become obedient
is to lose one's listeners. The silence of obedience is an unheard
silence. It is the silence of death. For this reason the demand
for obedience is inherently evil.

The silence of nature is the possibility of language. By subdu¬
ing nature the gods give it their own voice, but in making
nature an opponent they make all their listeners opponents.
By refusing the silence of nature they demand the silence
of obedience. The unspeakability of nature is therefore trans¬
formed into the unspeakability of language itself.

Infinite speech is that mode of discourse that consistently
reminds us of the unspeakability of nature. It bears no claim

108

to truth, originating from nothing but the genius of the
speaker. Infinite speech is therefore not about anything; it
is always to someone. It is not command, but address. It
belongs entirely to the speakable.

That language is not about anything gives it its status as
metaphor. Metaphor does not point at something there. Never
shall we find the kingdom of daylight's dauphin in one place
or another. It is not the role of metaphor to draw our sight
to what is there, but to draw our vision toward what is not
there and, indeed, cannot be anywhere. Metaphor is horizonal,
reminding us that it is one's vision that is limited, and not
what one is viewing.

The meaning of a finite speaker's discourse lies in what
precedes its utterance, what is already the case and therefore
is the case whether or not it is spoken.

The meaning of an infinite speaker's discourse lies in what
comes of its utterance—that is, whatever is the case because
it is spoken .

Finite language exists complete before it is spoken. There
is first a language —then we learn to speak it. Infinite language
exists only as it is spoken. There is first a language —when
we learn to speak it. It is in this sense that infinite discourse
always arises from a perfect silence.

Finite speakers come to speech with their voices already
trained and rehearsed. They must know what they are doing
with the language before they can speak it. Infinite speakers
must wait to see what is done with their language by the
listeners before they can know what they have said. Infinite
speech does not expect the hearer to see what is already known
to the speaker, but to share a vision the speaker could not
have had without the response of the listener.

Speaker and listener understand each other not because
they have the same knowledge about something, and not be-

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 109

cause they have established a likeness of mind, but because
they know "how to go on” with each other (Wittgenstein).

Because it is address, attending always on the response of
the addressed, infinite speech has the form of listening. Infinite
speech does not end in the obedient silence of the hearer,
but continues by way of the attentive silence of the speaker.
It is not a silence into which speech has died, but a silence
from which speech is born.

Infinite speakers do not give voice to another, but receive
it from another. Infinite speakers do not therefore appeal to
a world as audience, do not speak before a world, but present
themselves as an audience by way of talking with others. Finite
speech informs another about the world—for the sake of being
heard. Infinite speech forms a world about the other—for
the sake of listening.

It is for this reason that the gods, insofar as they speak as
the lords of this world, magisterially, speak before this world
and are therefore unable to change it. Such gods cannot create
a world but can only be creations of a world—can only be
idols. A god cannot create a world and be magisterial within
it. "The religions which represent divinity as commanding
whenever it has the power to do so seem false. Even though
they are monotheistic they are idolatrous” (Weil).

A god can create a world only by listening.

Were the gods to address us it would not be to bring us
to silence through their speech, but to bring us to speech
through their silence.

The contradiction of finite speech is that it must end by
being heard. The paradox of infinite speech is that it continues

only because it is a way of listening. Finite speech ends with
a silence of closure. Infinite speech begins with a disclosure
of silence.

Storytellers do not convert their listeners; they do not move
them into the territory of a superior truth. Ignoring the issue
of truth and falsehood altogether, they offer only vision. Story¬
telling is therefore not combative; it does not succeed or fail.
A story cannot be obeyed. Instead of placing one body of
knowledge against another, storytellers invite us to return from
knowledge to thinking, from a bounded way of looking to
an horizonal way of seeing.

Infinite speakers are Plato's poietai taking their place in
the historical. Storytellers enter the historical not when their
speaking is full of anecdotes about actual persons, or when
they appear as characters in their own tales, but when in
their speaking we begin to see the narrative character of our
lives. The stories they tell touch us. What we thought was
an accidental sequence of experiences suddenly takes the dra¬
matic shape of unresolved narrative.

There is no narrative without structure, or plot. In a great
story this structure seems like fate, like an inescapable judg¬
ment descending on its still unaware heroes, a great metaphys¬
ical causality that crowds out all room for choice. Fate arises
not as a limitation on our freedom, but as a manifestation
of our freedom, testimony that choice is consequent. The
exercise of your freedom cannot prevent the exercise of my
own freedom, but it can determine the context in which I
am to act freely. You cannot make choices for me, but you
can largely determine what my choices will be about. Great

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 111

stories explore the drama of this deeper touching of one free
person by another. They are therefore genuinely sexual dramas
astounding us once more with the magic of origins.

The myth of Oedipus is one of many great sexual narratives
in the cultural treasury of the West that plays on the dramatic
relation of fate and origin. Once Oedipus had impulsively
killed Laius, not knowing he was his own father, he was carried
ahead by ambition and lust into marriage with the dead man's
wife, unaware of her true identity. We can read this as fate
or we can read it as one act of willfulness that leads to another.
Oedipus has taken the posture of the Master Player executing
terminal moves—but the moves are not terminal. Oedipus
is able to bring nothing to an end. Even the act of blinding
himself, meant as a kind of concluding gesture, only brings
him to a higher vision. What Oedipus sees is not what the
gods have done to him, but what he has done. He learns
that what had been limited was his vision, and not what he
was viewing. His blinding is an unveiling, and like all unveiling
it is self-unveiling. Confronted in the end with nothing but
his own genius, Oedipus is finally able to touch. The end of
his story is a beginning.

What raises this story into the historical is not just that
Oedipus sees; it is that we see that he sees. We become
listeners who see that we are listening and therefore participat¬
ing in a now enlarged drama of origins. Nothing is explained
here. On the contrary, what we see is that everything remains
still to be said.

There is a risk here of supposing that because we know
our lives to have the character of narrative, we also know

112

what that narrative is. If I were to know the full story of
my life I would then have translated it back into explanation.
It is as though I could stand as audience to myself, seeing
the opening scene and the final scene at the same time, as
though I could see my life in its entirety. In doing so I would
be performing it, not living it.

Societal theorists are tempted into the belief that they know
the story of a civilization. They can script its final scene of
triumph or defeat. It is by way of such end-of-history thinking
that the discovered laws of behavior to which persons conform
become the scripted laws of behavior to which they must
conform.

True storytellers do not know their own story. What they
listen to in their poiesis is the disclosure that wherever there
is closure there is the possibility of a new opening, that they
do not die at the end, but in the course of play. Neither do
they know anyone else's story in its entirety. The primary
work of historians is to open all cultural termini, to reveal
continuity where we have assumed something has ended, to
remind us that no one's life, and no culture, can be known ,
as one would know a poiema, but only learned , as one would
learn a poiesis.

Historians become infinite speakers when they see that
whatever begins in freedom cannot end in necessity.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 113

We Control
Nature for
Societal
Reasons

We control nature for societal reasons. The control of
nature advances with our ability to predict the outcome of
natural processes. Inasmuch as predictions are but explanations
in reverse, it is possible that they will be quite as combative
as explanations. Indeed, prediction is the most highly devel¬
oped skill of the Master Player, for without it control of an
opponent is all the more difficult. It follows that our domina¬
tion of nature is meant to achieve not certain natural outcomes,
but certain societal outcomes.

A small group of physicists, using calculations of the highest
known abstraction, uncovered a predictable sequence of sub¬
atomic reactions that led directly to the construction of a
thermonuclear bomb. It is true that the successful detonation
of the bomb proved the predictions of the physicists, but it
is also true that we did not explode the bomb to prove them
correct; we exploded it to control the behavior of millions
of persons and to bring our relations with them to a certain
closure.

What this example shows is not that we can exercise power
over nature, but that our attempt to do so masks our desire
for power over each other. This raises a question as to the

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 117

cultural consequences of abandoning the strategy of power
in our attitude toward nature.

The alternative attitudes toward nature can be characterized
in a rough way by saying that the result of approaching nature
as a hostile Other whose designs are basically inimical to our
interests is the machine , while the result of learning to disci¬
pline ourselves to consist with the deepest discernable patterns
of natural order is the garden.

“Machine” is used here as inclusive of technology and not
as an example of it—as a way of drawing attention to the
mechanical rationality of technology. We might be surprised
by the technological devices that spring from the imagination
of gifted inventors and engineers, but there is nothing surpris¬
ing in the technology itself. The physicists' bomb is as thor¬
oughly mechanical as the Neanderthal's lever—each the
exercise of calculable cause-and-effect sequences.

“Garden” does not refer to the bounded plot at the edge
of the house or the margin of the city. This is not a garden
one lives beside, but a garden one lives within. It is a place
of growth, of maximized spontaneity. To garden is not to
engage in a hobby or an amusement; it is to design a culture
capable of adjusting to the widest possible range of surprise
in nature. Gardeners are acutely attentive to the deep patterns
of natural order, but are also aware that there will always be
much lying beyond their vision. Gardening is a horizonal activ¬
ity.

Machine and garden are not absolutely opposed to each
other. Machinery can exist in the garden quite as finite games
can be played within an infinite game. The question is not
one of restricting machines from the garden but asking
whether a machine serves the interest of the garden, or the

118

garden the interest of the machine. We are familiar with a
kind of mechanized gardening that has the appearance of
high productivity, but looking closely we can see that what
is intended is not the encouragement of natural spontaneity
but its harnessing.

The most elemental difference between the machine and
the garden is that one is driven by a force which must be
introduced from without, the other grown by an energy which
originates from within itself.

Certainly machines of extraordinary complexity have been
built: spacecraft, for example, that sustain themselves for
months in the void while performing complicated functions
with great accuracy. But no machine has been made, nor
can one be made, that has the source of its spontaneity within
itself. A machine must be designed, constructed, and fueled.

Certainly gardens can be treated with such a range of chemi¬
cal and technological strategies that we can speak of "raising”
food, and of the food we have raised as "produce.” But no
way has been found, or can be found, by which organic growth
can be forced from without. The application of fertilizers,
herbicides, and any number of other substances does not alter
growth but allows growth; it is meant to consist with natural
growth. A plant cannot be designed or constructed. Though
we seem to give it "fuel” in the form of rich earth and appropri¬
ate nutrients, we depend on the plant to make use of the
fuel by way of its own vitality. A machine depends on its
designer and its operator both for the supply of fuel and its

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 119

consumption. A machine has not the merest trace of its own
spontaneity or vitality. Vitality cannot be given, only found.

Just as nature has no outside, it has no inside. It is not
divided within itself and cannot therefore be used for or against
itself. There is no inherent opposition of the living and the
nonliving within nature; neither is more or less natural than
the other. The use of agricultural poisons, for example, will
surely kill selected organisms; it will arrest the spontaneity
of living entities—but it is not an unnatural act. Nature has
not been changed. All that changes is the way we discipline
ourselves to consist with natural order.

Our freedom in relation to nature is not the freedom to
change nature; it is not the possession of power over natural
phenomena. It is the freedom to change ourselves. We are
perfectly free to design a culture that will turn on the awareness
that vitality cannot be given but only found, that the given
patterns of spontaneity in nature are not only to be respected,
but to be celebrated.

Although "natural order” is the common expression, it has
something of a veiling quality about it. More properly speaking,
it is not the order of nature but its irreducible spontaneity
with which we find ourselves contending. That nature has
no outside, and no inside, that it suffers no opposition to
itself, that it is not moved by unnatural influence, is not the
expression of an order so much as it is the display of a perfect
indifference on nature's part to all matters cultural.

Nature’s source of movement is always from within itself;
indeed it is itself. And it is radically distinct from our own
source of movement. This is not to say that, possessing no

120

order, nature is chaotic. It is neither chaotic nor ordered.
Chaos and order describe the cultural experience of nature—
the degree to which nature's indifferent spontaneity seems
to agree with our current manner of cultural self-control. A
hurricane, or a plague, or the overpopulation of the earth
will seem chaotic to those whose cultural expectations are
damaged by them and orderly to those whose expectations
have been confirmed by them.

The paradox in our relation to nature is that the more
deeply a culture respects the indifference of nature, the more
creatively it will call upon its own spontaneity in response.
The more clearly we remind ourselves that we can have
no unnatural influence on nature, the more our culture will
embody a freedom to embrace surprise and unpredictabil¬
ity.

Human freedom is not a freedom over nature; it is the
freedom to be natural, that is, to answer to the spontaneity
of nature with our own spontaneity. Though we are free to
be natural, we are not free by nature; we are free by culture,
by history.

The contradiction in our relation to nature is that the more
vigorously we attempt to force its agreement with our own
designs the more subject we are to its indifference, the more
vulnerable to its unseeing forces. The more power we exercise
over natural process the more powerless we become before
it. In a matter of months we can cut down a rain forest
that took tens of thousands of years to grow, but we are helpless
in repulsing the desert that takes its place. And the desert,
of course, is no less natural than the forest.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 121

Such contradiction is most obvious in the matter of machin¬
ery. We make use of machines to increase our power, and
therefore our control, over natural phenomena. By exerting
themselves no more than is necessary to operate fingertip con¬
trols, a team of workers can cut six-lane highways through
mountains and dense forest, or fill in wetlands to build shop¬
ping malls.

While a machine greatly aids the operator in such tasks,
it also disciplines its operator. As the machine might be consid¬
ered the extended arms and legs of the worker, the worker
might be considered an extension of the machine. All ma¬
chines, and especially very complicated machines, require oper¬
ators to place themselves in a provided location and to perform
functions mechanically adapted to the functions of the ma¬
chine. To use the machine for control is to be controlled
by the machine.

To operate a machine one must operate like a machine.
Using a machine to do what we cannot do, we find we must
do what the machine does.

Machines do not, of course, make us into machines when
we operate them; we make ourselves into machinery in order
to operate them. Machinery does not steal our spontaneity
from us; we set it aside ourselves, we deny our originality.
There is no style in operating a machine. The more efficient
the machine, the more it either limits or absorbs our unique¬
ness into its operation.

Indeed, we come to think that the style of operation does
not belong to the operator at all, but is inherent in the ma¬
chine. Advertisers and manufacturers speak of their products
as though they have designed style into them. Most consumer
products are “styled” inasmuch as they actually standardize

122

the activity or the taste of the consumer. In a perfect contradic¬
tion we are urged to buy a “styled” artifact because others
are also buying it—that is, we are asked to express our genius
by giving up our genius.

Because we make use of machinery in the belief we can
increase the range of our freedom, and instead only decrease
it, we use machines against ourselves.

Machinery is contradictory in another way. Just as we use
machinery against ourselves, we also use machinery against
itself. A machine is not a way of doing something; it stands
in the way of doing something.

When we use machines to achieve whatever it is we desire,
we cannot have what we desire until we have finished with
the machine, until we can rid ourselves of the mechanical
means of reaching our intended outcome. The goal of technol¬
ogy is therefore to eliminate itself, to become silent, invisible,
carefree.

We do not purchase an automobile, for example, merely
to own some machinery. Indeed, it is not machinery we are
buying at all, but what we can have by way of it: a means
of rapidly carrying us from one location to another, an object
of envy for others, protection from the weather. Similarly, a
radio must cease to exist as equipment and become sound.
A perfect radio will draw no attention to itself, will make it
seem we are in the very presence of the source of its sound.
Neither do we watch a movie screen, nor look at television.
We look at what is on television, or in the movie, and become
annoyed when the equipment intrudes—when the film is unfo¬
cused or the picture tube malfunctions.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 123

When machinery functions perfectly it ceases to be there—
but so do we. Radios and films allow us to be where we are
not and not be where we are. Morever, machinery is veiling.
It is a way of hiding our inaction from ourselves under what
appear to be actions of great effectiveness. We persuade our¬
selves that, comfortably seated behind the wheels of our autos,
shielded from every unpleasant change of weather, and raising
or lowering our foot an inch or two, we have actually traveled
somewhere.

Such travel is not through space foreign to us, but in a
space that belongs to us. We do not move from our point
of departure, but with our point of departure. To be moved
from our living room by an automobile whose upholstered
seats differ scarcely at all from those in our living rooms, to
an airport waiting room and then to the airplane where we
are provided the same sort of furniture, is to have taken our
origin with us; it is to have left home without leaving home.
To be at home everywhere is to neutralize space.

Therefore, the importance of reducing time in travel: by
arriving as quickly as possible we need not feel as though
we had left at all, that neither space nor time can affect
us—as though they belong to us, and not we to them.

We do not go somewhere in a car, but arrive somewhere
in a car. Automobiles do not make travel possible, but make
it possible for us to move locations without traveling.

Thus, the theatricality of machinery: Such movement is
but a change of scenes. If effective, the machinery will see
to it that we remain untouched by the elements, by other
travelers, by those whose towns or lives we are traveling
through. We can see without being seen, move without being
touched.

When most effective, the technology of communication
allows us to bring the histories and the experiences of others

124

into our home, but without changing our home. When most
effective, the technology of travel allows us to pass through
the histories of other persons with the "comforts of home,”
but without changing those histories.

When it is most effective, machinery will have no effect
at all.

In still another way is machinery contradictory. Using it
against itself and against ourselves, we also use machinery
against each other

I cannot use machinery without using it with another. I
do not talk on the telephone; I talk with someone on the
telephone. 1 listen to someone on the radio, drive to visit a
friend, compute business transactions. To the degree that my
association with you depends on such machinery, the connect¬
ing medium makes each of us an extension of itself. If your
business activities cannot translate into data recognizable by
my computer, I can have no business with you. If you do
not live where I can drive to see you, I will find another
friend. In each case your relationship to me does not depend
on my needs but on the needs of my machinery.

If to operate a machine is to operate like a machine, then
we not only operate with each other like machines y we operate
each other like machines. And if a machine is most effective
when it has no effect, then we operate each other in such a
way that we reach the outcome desired—in such a way that
nothing happens.

The inherent hostility of machine-mediated relatedness is
nowhere more evident than in the use of the most theatrical
machines of all: instruments of war. All weapons are designed

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 125

to affect others without affecting ourselves, to make others
answerable to the technology in our control. Weapons are
the equipment of finite games designed in such a way that
they do not maximize the play but eliminate it. Weapons
are meant not to win contests but to end them. Killers are
not victors; they are unopposed competitors, players without
a game, living contradictions.

This is particularly the case with the airborne electronic
weaponry of the present century, where the operator deals
only with the technology—buttons, blips, lights, dials, levers,
computer data—and never with the unseen opponent. Indeed,
so empty of drama is the modern machinery of slaughter
that it is intended to assault enemies only while they are
still unseen. This reaches an extreme form in the belief that
our enemies are not unseen because they are enemies, but
are enemies because they are unseen.

There is a logic in the instrumentality of death that leads
us to killing the unseen because they are unseen. The crudest
spear or sword is raised by an attacker because the independent
existence of another cannot be countenanced —because the
other cannot be seen as an other . Just as I insist that the
condition of our friendship is your unresisting use of the tele¬
phone, I will expect the weapon in my hand to function with¬
out finding an other that can resist it. Killers can suffer no
suggestion that they are living into the open, that their histo¬
ries are not finished, that their freedom is always a freedom
with others, and not over others, that it is not their vision
that is limited but what they are viewing.

The fact that the technology of slaughter at vast distances
has become extremely sophisticated does not culturally ad¬
vance its highly trained operators over club-swinging primi-

126

tives; it makes complete the blindness that was but
rudimentary in the primitive. It is the supreme triumph of
resentment over vision. We are the unseeing killing the un¬
seen.

Not everyone who uses machinery is a killer. But when
the use of machinery springs from our attempt to respond
to the indifference of nature with an indifference of our own
to nature, we have begun to acquire the very indifference to
persons that has led to the century's grandest crimes by its
most civilized nations.

If indifference to nature leads to the machine, the indiffer¬
ence of nature leads to the garden. All culture has the form
of gardening: the encouragement of spontaneity in others by
way of one's own, the respect for source, and the refusal to
convert source into resource.

Gardeners slaughter no animals. They kill nothing. Fruits,
seeds, vegetables, nuts, grains, grasses, roots, flowers, herbs,
berries—all are collected when they have ripened, and when
their collection is in the interest of the garden's heightened
and continued vitality. Harvesting respects a source, leaves
it unexploited, suffers it to be as it is.

Animals cannot be harvested. They mature, but they do
not "ripen." They are killed not when they have completed
the cycle of their vitality but when they are at the peak of
their vitality. Finite gardeners, converting agriculture into
commerce, "raise" or "produce" animals—or meat products—
as though by machine. Animal husbandry is a science, a

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 127

method of controlling growth. It assumes that animals belong
to us. What is source in them is to be resource for us. Cattle
are confined to pens to prevent such movement as would
“toughen” their flesh. Geese, their feet nailed to the floor,
are force fed like machines until they can be butchered for
their fattened livers.

While machinery is meant to work changes without chang¬
ing its operators, gardening transforms its workers. One learns
how to drive a car, one learns to drive as a car; but one
becomes a gardener.

Gardening is not outcome-oriented. A successful harvest
is not the end of a garden's existence, but only a phase of
it. As any gardener knows, the vitality of a garden does not
end with a harvest. It simply takes another form. Gardens
do not “die” in the winter but quietly prepare for another
season.

Gardeners celebrate variety, unlikeness, spontaneity. They
understand that an abundance of styles is in the interest of
vitality. The more complex the organic content of the soil,
for example—that is, the more numerous its sources of
change—the more vigorous its liveliness. Growth promotes
growth.

So also in culture. Infinite players understand that the vigor
of a culture has to do with the variety of its sources, the
differences within itself. The unique and the surprising are
not suppressed in some persons for the strength of others.
The genius in you stimulates the genius in me.

One operates a machine effectively, so that it disappears,
giving way to results in which the machine has no part. One
gardens creatively, so that all the sources of the garden's vitality
appear in its harvest, giving rise to a continuity in which
we take an active part.

128

Inasmuch as gardens do not conclude with a harvest and
are not played for a certain outcome, one never arrives any¬
where with a garden.

A garden is a place where growth is found. It has its own
source of change. One does not bring change to a garden,
but comes to a garden prepared for change, and therefore
prepared to change. It is possible to deal with growth only
out of growth. True parents do not see to it that their children
grow in a particular way, according to a preferred pattern or
scripted stages, but they see to it that they grow with their
children. The character of one's parenting, if it is genuinely
dramatic, must be constantly altered from within as the chil¬
dren change from within. So, too, with teaching, or working
with, or loving each other.

It is in the garden that we discover what travel truly is.
We do not journey to a garden but by way of it.

Genuine travel has no destination. Travelers do not go some¬
where, but constantly discover they are somewhere else. Since
gardening is a way not of subduing the indifference of nature
but of raising one's own spontaneity to respond to the disre¬
garding vagaries and unpredictabilities of nature, we do not
look on nature as a sequence of changing scenes but look
on ourselves as persons in passage.

Nature does not change; it has no inside or outside. It is
therefore not possible to travel through it. AH travel is there¬
fore change within the traveler, and it is for that reason that
travelers are always somewhere else. To travel is to grow.

Genuine travelers travel not to overcome distance but to
discover distance. It is not distance that makes travel necessary,
but travel that makes distance possible. Distance is not deter-

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 129

mined by the measurable length between objects, but by the
actual differences between them. The motels around the air¬
ports in Chicago and Atlanta are so little different from the
motels around the airports of Tokyo and Frankfurt that all
essential distances dissolve in likeness. What is truly separated
is distinct; it is unlike. "The only true voyage would be not
to travel through a hundred different lands with the same
pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred
different pairs of eyes” (Proust).

A gardener, whose attention is ever on the spontaneities
of nature, acquires the gift of seeing differences, looks always
for the merest changes in plant growth, or in the composition
of the soil, the emerging populations of insects and earth¬
worms. So will gardeners, as parents, see changes of the small¬
est subtlety in their children, or as teachers see the signs of
an increasing skill, and possibly wisdom, in their students. A
garden, a family, a classroom—any place of human gathering
whatsoever—will offer no end of variations to be observed,
each an arrow pointing toward yet more changes. But these
observed changes are not theatrically amusing to genuine
gardeners; they dramatically open themselves to a renewed
future.

So, too, with those who look everywhere for difference,
who see the earth as source, who celebrate the genius in others,
who are not prepared against but for surprise. "I have traveled
far in Concord” (Thoreau).

Since machinery requires force from without, its use always
requires a search for consumable power. When we think of

130

nature as resource, it is as a resource for power. As we preoc¬
cupy ourselves with machinery, nature is increasingly thought
of as a reservoir of needed substances. It is a quantity of
materials that exist to be consumed, chiefly in our machines.

Being undivided, nature cannot be used against itself. We
do not therefore consume it , or exhaust it. We simply rear¬
range our societal patterns in a way that reduces our ability
to respond creatively to the existing patterns of spontaneity.
That is, to use the societal expression, we create waste . Waste,
of course, is by no means unnatural. The trash and garbage
of a civilization do not befoul nature; they are nature—but
in a form society no longer is able to exploit for its own
ends.

Society regards its waste as an unfortunate, but necessary,
consequence of its activities—what is left when we have made
essential societal goods available. But waste is not the result
of what we have made. It is what we have made. Waste
plutonium is not an indirect consequence of the nuclear indus¬
try; it is a product of that industry.

Waste is unveiling. As we find ourselves standing in garbage
that we know is our own, we find also that it is garbage we
have chosen to make, and having chosen to make it could
choose not to make it. Because waste is unveiling, we remove
it. We place it where it is out of sight. We either find unin¬
habited areas where waste can be disposed of, or fill them
with our refuse until they become uninhabitable. Since a flour¬
ishing society will vigorously exploit its natural resources, it
will produce correspondingly great quantities of trash, and

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 131

quickly its uninhabited lands will overflow with waste, threat¬
ening to make the society's own habitation into a waste¬
land.

Because waste is unveiling, it is not only placed out of
sight, it is declared a kind of antiproperty. No one owns it.
Part of the contradiction in the phenomenon of waste is that
treating nature as though it belongs to us we must soon treat
nature as though it belongs to no one. Not only does no
one own waste, no one wants it. Instead of competing to
possess these particular products, we compete to dispossess
them. We force it on others less able to rid themselves of
it. Trash accumulates in slums, sewage runs downstream, air¬
borne acid drifts hundreds of miles settling on the lands of
those powerless to halt its “disposal” into the atmosphere.
Thousands of square miles of farm lands have been laid waste
by the construction of multilane highways, or submerged
by dams whose water is used to flush waste from distant
cities.

Waste is the antiproperty that becomes the possession of
losers. It is the emblem of the untitled.

Waste is unveiling, because it persists in showing itself as
waste, and as out waste. If waste is the result of our indifference
to nature, it is also the way we experience the indifference
of nature. Waste is therefore a reminder that society is a
species of culture. Looking about at the wasteland into which
we have converted our habitation, we can plainly see that
nature is not whatever we want it to be; but we can also
plainly see that society is only what we want it to be.

It is a consequence of this contradiction that the more
waste a society produces, the more unveiling that waste is,
and thus the more vigorously must a society deny that it
produces any waste at all; the more it must dispose, or hide,
or ignore, its detritus.

132

Since the attempt to control nature is at its heart the at¬
tempt to control other persons, we can expect societies to
be less patient with those cultures which express some degree
of indifference to societal goals and values. It is this repeated
parallel that brings us to see that the society that creates
natural waste creates human waste.

Waste persons are those no longer useful as resources to
a society for whatever reason, and have become apatrides,
or noncitizens. Waste persons must be placed out of view—
in ghettos, slums, reservations, camps, retirement villages, mass
graves, remote territories, strategic hamlets—all places of deso¬
lation, and uninhabitable. We live in a century whose Master
Players have created many millions of such "superfluous per¬
sons” (Rubenstein).

A people does not become superfluous by itself, any more
than natural waste creates itself. It is society that declares
some persons to be waste. Human trash is not an unfortunate
burden on a society, an indirect result of its proper conduct;
it is its direct product. European settlers in the Ameri¬
can, African, and Asian continents did not happen to come
upon populations of unwanted persons nature had thrust in
their way; they made them superfluous by way of some of
the most important and irreversible principles of their societ¬
ies.

Strictly speaking, waste persons do not exist outside the
boundaries of a society. They are not society’s enemies. One
does not go to war against them, as one goes to war against
another society. Waste persons do not constitute an alterna¬
tive or threatening society; they constitute an unveiling cul¬
ture. They are therefore "purged.” A society cleanses itself of
them.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 133

When society is unveiled, when we see that it is whatever
we want it to be, that it is a species of culture with nothing
necessary in it, by no means a phenomenon of nature or a
manifestation of instinct, nature is no longer shaped and fitted
into one or another set of societal goals. Unveiled, we stand
before a nature whose only face is its hidden self-origination:
its genius.

We see nature as genius when we see as genius.

We understand nature as source when we understand our¬
selves as source. We abandon all attempts at an explanation
of nature when we see that we cannot be explained, when
our own self-origination cannot be stated as fact. We behold
the irreducible otherness of nature when we behold ourselves
as its other.

For the infinite player, seeing as genius, nature is the abso¬
lutely unlike. The infinite player recognizes nothing on the
face of nature. Nature displays not only its indifference to
human existence but its difference as well.

Nature offers no home. Although we become gardeners
in response to its indifference, nature does nothing of itself
to feed us. In Jewish and Islamic mythology God provided
us with a garden but did not, indeed could not, do the garden¬
ing for us. It was only a garden because we could respond
to it, because we could be responsible for it. Our responsibility
lay in noting its variabilities and discrete features. We were
to name the animals, separating one from the other. This
garden was not a machine-like device automatically providing

154

food for us. Neither were we machine-like, driven from without
and destined from within. According to this myth, God did
breathe life into us, but in order to continue living we had
to do our own breathing.

But responsibility for the garden does not mean that we
can make a garden of nature, as though it were a poiema
of which we could take possession. A garden is not something
we have, over which we stand as gods. A garden is a poiesis,
a receptivity to variety, a vision of differences that leads always
to a making of differences. The poet joyously suffers the unlike,
reduces nothing, explains nothing, possesses nothing.

We stand before genius in silence. We cannot speak it,
we can only speak as it. Yet, though I speak as genius, I
cannot speak for genius. I cannot give nature a voice in my
script. I can not give others a voice in my script—without
denying their own source, their originality. To do so is to
cease responding to the other, to cease being responsible. No
one and nothing belong in my script.

The homelessness of nature, its utter indifference to human
existence, disclose to the infinite player that nature is the
genius of the dramatic.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 135

SEVEN

Myth
Provokes
Explanation
but Accepts
None ofIt

Myth provokes explanation but accepts none of it. Where
explanation absorbs the unspeakable into the speakable, myth
reintroduces the silence that makes original discourse possible.

Explanations establish islands, even continents, of order and
predictability. But these regions were first charted by adventur¬
ers whose lives are narratives of exploration and risk. They
found them only by mythic journeys into the wayless open.
When the less adventuresome settlers arrive later to work
out the details and domesticate these spaces, they easily lose
the sense that all this firm knowledge does not expunge myth,
but floats in it.

Few discoveries were greater than Copernicus', for they
projected an order into the heavens that no one has successfully
challenged. Many thought then, and some still think, that
this great statement of truth dispelled clouds of myth that
had kept humankind in retarding darkness. What Copernicus
dispelled, however, were not myths but other explanations.
Myths lie elsewhere. To see where, we do not look at the
facts in Copernicus' works; we look for the story in his stating
them. Knowledge is what successful explanation has led to;
the thinking that sent us forth, however, is pure story.

Copernicus was a traveler who went with a hundred pairs

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 139

of eyes, daring to look again at all that is familiar in the
hope of vision. What we hear in this account is the ancient
saga of the solitary wanderer, the peregrinus , who risks any¬
thing for the sake of surprise. True, at a certain point he
stopped to look and may have ended his journey as a Master
Player setting down bounded fact. But what resounds most
deeply in the life of Copernicus is the journey that made
knowledge possible and not the knowledge that made the
journey successful.

That myth does not accept the explanations it provokes
we can see in the boldness with which thinkers in any territorial
endeavor reexamine the familiar for a higher seeing. Indeed,
the very liveliness of a culture is determined not by how fre¬
quently these thinkers discover new continents of knowledge
but by how frequently they depart to seek them.

A culture can be no stronger than its strongest myths.

A story attains the status of myth when it is retold, and
persistently retold, solely for its own sake.

If I tell a story as a way of bracing up an argument or
amusing an audience, I am not telling it for its own sake.
To tell a story for its own sake is to tell it for no other reason
than that it is a story. Great stories have this feature: To
listen to them and learn them is to become their narrators.

Our first response to hearing a story is the desire to tell
it ourselves—the greater the story the greater the desire. We
will go to considerable time and inconvenience to arrange a
situation for its retelling. It is as though the story is itself
seeking the occasion for its recurrence, making use of us as

140

its agents. We do not go out searching for stories for ourselves;
it is rather the stories that have found us for themselves.

Great stories cannot be observed, any more than an infinite
game can have an audience. Once I hear the story I enter
into its own dimensionality. I inhabit its space at its time. I
do not therefore understand the story in terms of my experi¬
ence, but my experience in terms of the story. Stories that
have the enduring strength of myths reach through experience
to touch the genius in each of us. But experience is the result
of this generative touch, not its cause. So far is this the case
that we can even say that if we cannot tell a story about
what happened to us y nothing has happened to us.

It was not Freud's theory of the unconscious that led him
to Oedipus, but the myth of Oedipus that shaped the way
he listened to his patients. 'The theory of instincts," he wrote,
"is so to say our mythology." So too, then, the theory of
the unconscious that follows from it, and the superego, and
the ego. This is a mythology of such poetic strength that it
has altered not only the way we understand our experience,
but our experience itself. Who of us has not known a crisis
of ego, the disturbing presence of unwanted feelings, or the
anxious recoil from a more polymorphously embodied sexual¬
ity? These experiences are not described by Freud the dispas¬
sionate scientist; they are made possible by Freud the mythic
dreamer.

As myths make individual experience possible, they also
make collective experience possible. Whole civilizations rise
from stories—and can rise from nothing else. It is not the
historical experience of Jews that makes the Torah meaningful.
The Torah is no more a description of the creation of the
earth and early Jewish life than the theory of instincts is a
description of the psyches of a handful of bourgeois Viennese

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 141

of the early twentieth century. The Torah is not the story
of the Jews; it is what makes Judaism a story.

We tell myths for their own sake, because they are stories
that insist on being stories—and insist on being told. We
come to life at their touch.

However seriously we might regard them as so much inert
poiema, and attach metaphysical meanings to them, they
spring back out of their own vitality. When we look into a
story to find its meaning, it is always a meaning we have
brought with us to look at.

Myths are like magic trees in the garden of culture. They
do not grow on but out of the silent earth of nature. The
more we strip these trees of their fruit or prune them back
to our favored design, the more imposing and fecund they
become.

Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have
meanings, but stories that give meanings.

Storytellers become metaphysicians, or ideologists, when
they come to believe they know the entire story of a people.
This is history theatricalized, with the beginning and end in
plain sight. A psychoanalyst who looks for the Freudian myth
in patients imposes a filter that lets through nothing the psy¬
choanalyst was not prepared to find.

The psychotherapeutic relationship will become horizonal
only when both patient and therapist realize that the Freudian
myth does not determine the meaning of what happens be¬
tween them, but offers the possibility that their relationship
will have a story of its own.

The Freudian myth does not therefore repeat itself in their

142

relationship, but resonates in it. Those Jews who claim the
right to certain territories on the basis of a biblical promise,
those Christians who believe the Russians are the great evil
armies foreseen in biblical prophecies of the end of the world,
repeat the bible but do not resonate with it.

We resonate with myth when it resounds in us. A myth
resounds in me when its voice is heard in mine but not heard
as mine. I do not resonate when I quote Jeremiah or when
I speak as Jeremiah, but only when Jeremiah speaks in a way
that touches an original voice in me. The speech of New
Yorkers resonates not because they talk like New Yorkers,
but because when they talk we hear New York in their voice.

The resonance of myth collapses the apparent distinction
between the story told by one person to another and the
story of their telling and listening. It is one thing for you to
tell me the story of Muhammad; it is quite another for me
to tell the story of your telling me about Muhammad. Ordi¬
narily we confine the story to the words of the speaker. But
in doing so we treat it as a story quoted, not a story told.
In your relating, and not repeating, the story of Muhammad,
I am touched, and I respond from my genius. Something
has begun. But in touching, you are also touched. Something
has begun between us. Our relationship has opened forward
dramatically. Since this drama emerged from the telling of
the story of Muhammad, our story resonates with Muham¬
mad's, and Muhammad's with ours.

As myths are told, and continue to resound in the telling,
they come to us already richly resonant. The stories they are
sound deeply with the stories of their telling. Their strength
as stories lies in their ability to invite us into their drama.
It is a drama that contains an entire history of voices, sounding
and resounding from a thousand sources in our culture. For
this reason myths are significantly unresolved—but unresolved

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 143

in the way of an infinite game, having rules, or narrative struc¬
ture, that allow any number of participants at any time to
enter the drama without fixing its plot or bringing it to closure
in a final scene. In such stories much will be said about closure,
or death, but their telling will always disclose the way death
comes in the course of play and not at its end.

Myths of irrepressible resonance have lost all trace of an
author. Even when sacred texts are written down by an identifi¬
able prophet or evangelist, it is invariably thought that these
words were first spoken to their recorders and not spoken
by them. Moses received the law and did not compose it.
Muhammad heard the Quran and did not dictate it. Christians
do not read Mark but the gospel according to Mark. Hindus
understand their most authoritative texts, the Vedas, to be
heard ( sruti ), and the literature that derives from the Vedas
to be composed ( smriti ).

The gospel can be heard nowhere except from those who
themselves have heard it. Although I might hear New York
in your voice, there is no possibility I could hear New York
by itself. No myth, therefore, exists by itself; neither does it
have a discoverable origin. Whom could we name as the first
New Yorker? Even when it is God who is heard by the prophet,
it is a god who speaks in the language and idiom of the prophet,
and not in locutions restricted to divine utterance—as though
that god's speaking were itself a form of listening.

Indeed, myth is the highest form of our listening to each
other, of offering a silence that makes the speech of the other
possible. This is why listening is far more valued by religion

144

than speaking. Fides ex auditu . Faith comes by listening, Paul
said.

The opposite of resonance is amplification. A choir is the
unified expression of voices resonating with each other; a loud¬
speaker is the amplification of a single voice, excluding all
others. A bell resonates, a cannon amplifies. We listen to
the bell, we are silenced by the cannon.

When a single voice is sufficiently amplified, it becomes
a speaking that makes it impossible for any other voices to
be heard. We do not listen to a loudspeaker for what is being
said, but only because it is all that is being said. Magisterial
speech is amplified speech; it is speech that silences. Loud¬
speaking is a mode of command, and therefore a speech de¬
signed to bring itself to an end as completely and swiftly as
possible. The amplified voice seeks obedient action on the
part of its hearers and an immediate end to their speech.
There is no possibility of conversation with a loudspeaker.

Ideology is the amplification of myth. It is the assumption
that since the beginning and end of history are known there
is nothing more to say. History is therefore to be obediently
lived out according to the ideology. Just as the warmakers
of Europe regularly melted down the bells to recast them
into cannon, the metaphysicians have found the meaning of
their myths and announced those meanings without their nar¬
rative resonance. The myths themselves are now regarded as
falsehoods or curiosities, and are therefore to be disregarded,
if not forbidden.

What ideologists are concerned to hide is the choral nature

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 145

of history, the sense that it is a symphony of very different,
even opposed, voices, each nonetheless making the other
possible.

If it is true that myth provokes explanation, then it is also
true that explanation's ultimate design is to eliminate myth.
It is not just that the availability of bells in churches and
town halls of Europe makes it possible to forge new cannon;
it is that the cannon are forged in order to silence the bells.
This is the contradiction of finite play in its highest form:
to play in such a way that all need for play is erased.

The loudspeaker, successfully muting all other voices and
therefore all possibility of conversation, is not listened to at
all, and for that reason loses its own voice and becomes mere
noise. Whenever we succeed in being the only speaker, there
is no speaker at all. Julius Caesar originally sought power in
Rome because he loved to play the very dangerous style of
politics common to the Republic; but he played the game
so well that he destroyed all his opponents, making it impossi¬
ble for him to find genuinely dangerous combat. He was unable
to do the very thing for which he sought power. His word
was now irresistible, and for that reason he could speak with
no one, and his isolation was complete. "We might almost
say this man was looking for an assassination" (Syme).

If we are to say that all explanation is meant to silence
myth itself, then it will follow that whenever we find people
deeply committed to explanation and ideology, whenever play
takes on the seriousness of warfare, we will find persons trou¬
bled by myths they cannot forget they have forgotten. The

146

myths that cannot be forgotten are those so resonant with
the paradox of silence they become the source of our thinking,
even our culture, and our civilization.

These are the myths we can easily discover and name, but
whose meanings continually elude us, myths whose conversion
to truth never quite fills the bells of their resonance with
the sand of metaphysical interpretation. These are often ex¬
ceedingly simple stories. Abraham is an example. Although
only two children were born to Abraham in his long life,
and one of those was illegitimate, he was promised that his
descendents would be as numberless as the stars of the heavens.
All three of the West's major religions consider themselves
children of Abraham, though each has often understood to
be itself the only and final family of the patriarch, an under¬
standing always threatened by the resounding phrase: num¬
bered as the stars of the heavens. This is the myth of a future
that always has a future; there is no closure in it. It is a
myth of horizon.

The myth of the Buddha's enlightenment has the same
paradox in it, the same provocation to explanation but with
as little possibility of settling the matter. It is the story of a
mere mortal, completely without divine aid, undertaking suc¬
cessfully a spiritual quest for release from all forms of bondage,
including the need to report this release to others. The perfect
unspeakability of this event has given rise to an immense
flow of literature in scores of languages that shows no signs
of abating.

Perhaps the Christian myth has been the narrative most
disturbing to the ideological mind. It is, like those of Abraham
and the Buddha, a very simple tale: that of a god who listens
by becoming one of us. It is a god "emptied" of divinity,
who gave up all privilege of commanding speech and "dwelt

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 147

among us,” coming "not to be served, but to serve,” "being
all things to all persons.” But the worlds to which he came
received him not. They no doubt preferred a god of magisterial
utterance, a commanding idol, a theatrical likeness of their
own finite designs. They did not expect an infinite listener
who joyously took their unlikeness on himself, giving them
their own voice through the silence of wonder, a healing and
holy metaphor that leaves everything still to be said.

Those Christians who deafened themselves to the resonance
of their own myth have driven their killing machines through
the garden of history, but they did not kill the myth. The
emptied divinity whom they have made into an Instrument
of Vengeance continues to return as the Man of Sorrows
bringing with him his unfinished story, and restoring the voices
of the silenced.

100

The myth of Jesus is exemplary, but not necessary. No
myth is necessary. There is no story that must be told. Stories
do not have a truth that someone needs to reveal, or someone
needs to hear. It is part of the myth of Jesus that it makes
itself unnecessary; it is a narrative of the word becoming flesh,
of language entering history; a narrative of the word becoming
flesh and dying, of history entering language . Who listens
to his myth cannot rise above history to utter timeless truths
about it.

It is not necessary for infinite players to be Christians; in¬
deed it is not possible for them to be Christians—seriously.
Neither is it possible for them to be Buddhists, or Muslims,
or atheists, or New Yorkers—seriously. All such titles can only

148

be playful abstractions, mere performances for the sake of
laughter.

Infinite players are not serious actors in any story, but the
joyful poets of a story that continues to originate what they
cannot finish.

101

There is but one infinite game.

FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES 149

INDEX

Numbers following entries refer to sections.

Adams, John Quincy, 33
Art, 42, 43, 44; see also Poiema, Poiesis,
Poietes

Audience, 13, 54, 64, 66, 69, 77; see also
World

Augustine, 74

Bacon, Francis, 70, 71
Birth, 53

Bismarck, von, Otto, 33
Blake, William, 52

Boundaries, 3, 4, 6, 11, 45, 48, 60, 63,
64; see also Limitations
Burckhardt, Jacob, 33

Contradiction, 13, 21, 22, 24, 54, 83
Copernicus, 94

Culture, 33, 35, 36, 42^7, 80, 83, 87,
91, 92

Death, 11, 20-23
Dickens, Charles, 36 (quoted)

Dramatic, the, 15, 16, 23, 54

Einstein, Albert, 70
Eliot, George, 64
Evil, 30, 31, 75

Explanation, 70, 73-75, 78-80, 94, 99
Flew, Antony, 22

Freedom, 12, 13, 47, 68, 73, 78, 79, 82,
83

Freud, Sigmund, 53, 58, 95

Garden, 80,81,87, 88, 93
Genius, 51-55, 57, 58, 60, 69, 70, 73,
76, 78, 84, 87, 88, 92, 93, 95, 96

Healing, 56

Hegel, G. W. F., 48

Heidegger, Martin, 64

Heisenberg, Werner, 71

History, 73, 74, 78, 79, 98, 100

Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 72 (quoted)

Horizon, 45, 46, 48

Ideology, 47, 98; see also Metaphysics

Jesus, 21, 25

Language, 72, 73, 75-78, 100
Limitations, 12, 52; see also Boundaries
Listening, 77, 97
Locke, John, 37
Looking, 52

Machine, 80, 81, 84-87, 89; see also
Technology

Marx, Karl, 21, 35 (quoted), 57
Master Player, 16, 17, 25, 49, 57, 58,
70, 72, 75, 78, 80, 91
Meister Eckhart, 69
Metaphor, 72, 76

Metaphysics, 47, 50; see also Ideology
Moving, 55; see also Touching
Myth, 94-100

INDEX 151

Names, 25

Narrative, 73, 78, 79
Nature, 70-73, 75, 76, 80, 82, 83, 86-
90, 92, 93
Nazism, 30, 41
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 23, 54

Oedipus, 78

Paradox, 24, 51, 83

Paul, 20, 21, 25

Plato, 41, 42, 49

Poets, 49; see also Poietes

Poiema, 47, 50, 69

Poiesis, 42, 44, 47, 50, 62, 69, 79

Poietes (plural: Poietai), 41-44, 50, 78

Power, 27-29, 34, 80

Prize, 21, 57, 67

Property, 36-41, 44, 58, 74, 90

Proust, Marcel, 88

Rank, Otto, 44
Renaissance, 45-47
Roles, 13-15

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 33, 48, 61
Rubenstein, Richard L, 91
Rules, 8-11, 16, 63

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 13
Seeing, 52
Sexuality, 57-62
Shaw, George Bernard, 13
Silence, 72, 73, 75, 77
Society, 33-36, 41, 42, 45, 48, 58, 80,
90-92

Story: see Myth, Narrative

Strength, 29

Syme, Ronald, Sir, 99

Technology, 80, 85; see also Machine
Theatrical, the, 15, 16, 22, 33, 37-41,
53-55, 57, 67, 85
Thoreau, Henry David, 88
Time, 6, 17, 19, 27, 64, 67-69
Title, 18-20, 25-28, 36, 37, 57, 75
Touching, 55-57
Trash, 89-91

Veblen, Thorstein, 40
Veiling, 13, 49, 55

Waste, 89-91
Weil, Simone, 77
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 76
World, 63-67, 77; see also Audience

Zen Buddhism, 32

152

From Finite and Infinite Games :

"There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called
finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the
purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of
continuing the play."

"The rules of a finite game may not change; the rules of an
infinite game must change."

"Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players
play with boundaries."

"Finite players are serious; infinite players are playful."

"Finite players win titles; infinite players have nothing but their

names."

"A finite player plays to be powerful; an infinite player
plays with strength."

"Finite players are theatrical; infinite players are dramatic."

"A finite player consumes time; an infinite player
generates time."

"The finite player aims to win eternal life; the infinite player
aims for eternal birth."

it* „

"Normally we add new facts to existing knowledge.
But once in a while a book like this comes along and
does just the opposite—it adds a new pattern of know¬
ledge to existing facts. The result is striking. Old dull
things you've known for years suddenly stand up in a
whole new dimension."

—Robert M. Pirsig,

author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

PRINTED IN U.S.A.

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